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I've been advocating for RSS support, and you should too

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Re: I've been advocating for RSS support, and you should too

#191

Post by rglullis »

bluebarbet wrote: post #171
cgriswald wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A publisher does not want countless browsers scraping arbitrary web pages just to see if they’ve changed when they can instead offer a single lightweight end point specifically for content that is intended to be updated. If browsers started doing this scraping I can only imagine the arms race. I can only see this happening as a service. A company crawls the web—probably a search company. Their LLM classifies changes.…

This was part of the technical justification for RSS: concentrate all the redundant page hits in once place. But another reason was that parsing an article list from messy tables-based HTML was harder than it is today with HTML5. There's even a feed attribute `h-feed` available today, which effectively turns list pages into feeds. Nobody uses it. The problem with the "single lightweight endpoint" is that it has to be…

> There's even a feed attribute `h-feed` available today, which effectively turns list pages into feeds.

Are you referring to the microformats tags? They were never standard, and they were never meant to "turn pages into things".

Microformats, while nice and useful, were never meant to be more as compilation of certain adopted practices by the indieweb crowd.

Re: I've been advocating for RSS support, and you should too

#192

Post by [deleted] »

palata wrote: post #187
magpi3 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question: wouldn't it be simpler for text-only email readers to have plugins that runs HTML-only emails through a command that converts the HTML to text?

I don't think so. If you print the HTML, it's often full of " ", images and links unrelated to the actual content. It's hard to extract the meaningful part of that pile of stuff in a trustworthy way (and you wouldn't want to lose information). Also many of those emails are autogenerated. So the template has to be done once, and that's it. And it should be trivial for whoever composes the HTML email to copy-paste…

[deleted]

Re: I've been advocating for RSS support, and you should too

#193

Post by kschaul »

I love RSS, but I often want to create a feed from websites that don’t offer RSS support (or the right features). So I built a little web service that, given a URL and a CSS selector, returns an RSS feed of those items. Figured it might be useful for others too. Code -> https://github.com/kevinschaul/feedmaker Hosted version -> https://feedmaker.fly.dev/

Re: I've been advocating for RSS support, and you should too

#194

Post by _heimdall »

palata wrote: post #188
_heimdall wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It comes down to a push versus pull architecture. RSS is pull based, you aren't notified when a feed is updated. Most people today want push based with a feed, with all the bells and whistles of a social feed that is updated instantly. Federation comes in mainly because push based systems require a server managing who follows who, what is posted, and who to notify of updates. That's a lot of information for one centr…

Right, those are good points. Still I can't help but to wonder whether those notifications are needed or not. Except for instant messaging, I generally don't want notifications. Like I don't need to be told that a new podcast is available, I'll see it next time I open the app. I would like to at least have the choice to use RSS instead of having to go through a complicated federated system.

That's actually the main reason I still use RSS, I never found a need for most notifications and the complexity required to manage a push-based system aren't worth it to me.

Even if I'm using someone else's system, I just don't like the idea of giving them a reason/need to manage all that for me. RSS works fine 99% of the time.

Re: I've been advocating for RSS support, and you should too

#195

Post by rplnt »

black3r wrote: post #165
n144q wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dude, that's completely irrelevant. Most people switched from Internet Explorer. Firefox was never the "mainstream" choice.

> Firefox was never the "mainstream" choice. This may be more regional-based and profession-based though. Around 2010 when Chrome was entering the market Firefox had around 30% global market share. In Slovakia where I'm from Firefox was "mainstream enough" that we had it pre-installed on high school and library computers and were taught to use it instead of IE as early as 2005..., But also in lots of enterprise-style…

I think Opera had even bigger share in Eastern European countries at the time. But it was actively killed by Google. From homepage ads on google/youtube to blocking features or whole applications based on user agent.

Re: I've been advocating for RSS support, and you should too

#196

Post by bluebarbet »

rglullis wrote: post #191
bluebarbet wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was part of the technical justification for RSS: concentrate all the redundant page hits in once place. But another reason was that parsing an article list from messy tables-based HTML was harder than it is today with HTML5. There's even a feed attribute `h-feed` available today, which effectively turns list pages into feeds. Nobody uses it. The problem with the "single lightweight endpoint" is that it has to be…

> There's even a feed attribute `h-feed` available today, which effectively turns list pages into feeds. Are you referring to the microformats tags? They were never standard, and they were never meant to "turn pages into things". Microformats, while nice and useful, were never meant to be more as compilation of certain adopted practices by the indieweb crowd.

OK I won't dispute that. The problem is that they would function nicely as a pragmatic solution to the underlying problem. Maintaining a few HTML attributes on an existing webpage is significantly easier than maintaining an RSS XML endpoint.

Re: I've been advocating for RSS support, and you should too

#197

Post by trekz »

rmnclmnt wrote: post #9

Love RSS, been using (and paying for) miniflux for a few years now. Do someone knows a way to retrieve RSS feeds URLs for any podcast that would be hosted on major platforms? (Spotify, Apple Music) I subscribed to podcast having some hosted website (where they are publishing the RSS feed from) but most of them don’t

You can try openrss.org. I believe the Spotify and Apple Music feeds will work for you.

https://openrss.org/feeds/spotify

Re: I've been advocating for RSS support, and you should too

#199

Post by geor9e »

I want to attribute RSS never taking off in popularity to malice on the part of big tech to catch and kill a threat to their walled garden social media advertising model, because I don't want to face that humanity is just too incompetent to realize how great RSS is.

Re: I've been advocating for RSS support, and you should too

#200

Post by darekkay »

gudzpoz wrote: post #64

Speaking of advocating RSS, I was trying out Nikola [0] for static site generation and found that they have a really nice-looking RSS end-point [1] that is viewable both from the browser and an RSS reader. Looking into the XML, it turns out it's called xml-stylesheet: And I would argue that this is an excellent way to introduce new readers to RSS: instead of the browser popping up a download prompt, you can make your…

I've once blogged about this technique, in case someone wants to learn more about it: https://darekkay.com/blog/rss-styling/
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