Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

reedybear.bearblog.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 248 posts

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

#221

Post by account42 »

ibaikov wrote: post #175
EvanAnderson wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worry about YouTube RSS feeds getting popular and Google killing them. Every time I see them discussed publicly I have this "Ssshh! Keep it on the down low!" reaction. I browse YouTube anonymously, have an ad blocker setup that pretty much eliminates all ads, and track my "subscriptions" with RSS. It's highly usable. I use a fork of tt-rss and actually embed the YouTube videos in the reader pane so I never see any…

This! I am very sad x/twitter stopped offering RSS and the api price is ridiculous

Somehow there are still a couple of Nitter instances that keep working despite the API shenanigans: https://status.d420.de/

I use that for my ex-twitter RSS feeds.

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

#222

Post by PeterStuer »

alifeee wrote: post #99
PeterStuer wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My suggestion for best practice would be to have a feed endpoint that is as minimal and clean as possible, and provide a separate endpoint (can be the same base url but with a parameter) for human consumption. This ensures maximal compatibility and ease of consumption for both machine and human.

I disagree, you can have an XML feed that does both For example: https://andrewstiefel.com/feed.xml

Yes, and if everything is properly configured that is great. Where is falls apart is when your site host/admin slaps Cloudflare protection on the domain and forgets to properly exclude the RSS pages, then programs can't fetch the feed without resorting to anti-bot evasion tech scraping, and are left with rendered HTML instead of the actual feed and have to deal with that.

Niche? It happens far more than you think.

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

#223

Post by account42 »

magpi3 wrote: post #153
beretguy wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most people also decide Most people didn't decide. Most people were tricked into using chrome. Most people are not computer literate.

I'm a teacher, and Google Classroom is ubiquitous in American schools. I was not tricked into using Chrome. It is without a doubt the best browser for Google Apps. Mozilla is laggy when editing documents and doesn't have an extension for offline editing. Give Google credit: they have created a very useful ecosystem that has won people over in the marketplace. I NEVER thought anything would convince companies to move…

What you are describing is the reason why we have antitrust laws.

Creating an ecosystem where you web apps "encourage" users to use your browser is the antithesis of an open marketplace.

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

#224

Post by account42 »

verisimi wrote: post #155
_Algernon_ wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Yes, this is true. But then nefarious tricks by tech companies aren't exactly punished. Eg google itself attempted to kill rss, by massively supporting it then dropping it. This is not an illegal or punishable offence (it is immoral imo), but illustrates the point that these companies attempt to sculpt the reality, to train people into compromise. It can't be a one way street only, where individuals have to fend for…

> Eg google itself attempted to kill rss, by massively supporting it then dropping it.

Good old EEE.

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

#225

Post by account42 »

_heimdall wrote: post #126
palata wrote: post #3

RSS is great. Most blog engines support RSS by default. Podcasts typically use RSS (even if the app goes to great length to hide it). I sometimes wonder why there is so much push for "federation" and so few for... well just simple interoperable solutions that just require a client to connect to whatever server it wants with a well-known protocol.

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…

The push-based federated systems could still be built on top of RSS - have a pull-based feed as the source of truth and then optional push-based notifications for those that want more timely updates.

Ideally the push-based parts would be optional for both ends so you could host a static feed and still have people see those updates in their fancy fediverse apps, just not immediately when you post them.

Instead we have a completely different standard without a simple core that you can easily implement if you don't need all the bells and whistles.

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

#226

Post by account42 »

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…

Decoding   and other entities should be part of converting the HTML to text. This is absolutely basic.

> So the template has to be done once, and that's it.

Except the world is not static and then when the HTML template gets updated they'll forget the text template and now you are missing vital information. Perhaps even legally required information like unsubscribe links.

Supporting text email only makes sense if that will actually be tested. Otherwise you are better of just rendering the HTML to text locally. That's going to lose you less information than a forgotten text mail template.

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

#227

Post by account42 »

palata wrote: post #215
rednafi wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. I didn’t even know you could do it. I wonder how to do that in a mainstream email client like Gmail on the web.

GMail sends both HTML and plaintext versions by default.

It does however do so using an automated HTML to text conversion that you could also just do in your client so it's not really all that helpful.

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

#228

Post by account42 »

bluebarbet wrote: post #116

While I use RSS, I think we need to recognize that it's slowly going away. Even a single publisher that's missing a feed will be a deal-breaker for any new adopters. And RSS is an over-complex solution anyway, designed for a time before web standards when sites all had spaghetti table layouts. Today there's no need to create a whole shadow site in fussily-formatted XML for what can usually be found in the page source…

> While I use RSS, I think we need to recognize that it's slowly going away.

Do we?

> Even a single publisher that's missing a feed will be a deal-breaker for any new adopters.

Is a single publisher not being on your favorite social media app also a deal breaker? Where does this absurd requirement come from - most people already end up visiting multiple sources for their daily updates. If RSS can reduce that it's useful even if you still need more than one.

> And RSS is an over-complex solution anyway

It's extremely simple compared the "modern" alternatives (social media APIs).

> I still don't understand why this solution has not taken off yet. It's clearly optimal.

Because it doesn't actually improve anything over the status quo. You still need to do the work to implement it whether it's inline or a separate file for the feed and the inline version is more prone to breakage with website changes.

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

#230

Post by account42 »

rglullis wrote: post #100
grumbel wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not talking about RSS, I am talking about plain old bookmarks. Browser never would give you notification when something you bookmarked changed. The RSS feature was always kind of useless, since it required that the website provided a RSS feed to begin with, which most don't. The implementation in Firefox was also horrible on top. HTML is a markup language, with header, datetime and article tags, parse that and d…

I guess you are vastly underestimating the complexity of parsing HTML and extracting the relevant information out of it. It might seem trivial nowadays, but it falls well within https://xkcd.com/1425/ territory if you take into account that the majority of web pages are basically producing non-spec conforming (X)HTML. And if you respond with "well, I don't care about the actual content, I just want to receive a notif…

> if you take into account that the majority of web pages are basically producing non-spec conforming (X)HTML

That part is a non-issue since Browsers need to be able to turn that tag soup into a sane DOM already. And these days how to do that is well specified.

Post reply on HN