Didn't we get enough of this fight 20 years ago? Let's not piss off Dave Winer again. Reminder: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better
Isn't this just VHS v Betamax again?
Only the porn industry can answer that question.
Atom is better than RSS, in ways that matter
21–30 of 111 posts
Re: Atom is better than RSS, in ways that matter
#22tl;dr
Atom can do Some podcast apps (Apple Podcasts) don't support Atom, so then plain RSS is better.
So it doesn't really matter that much.
Re: Atom is better than RSS, in ways that matter
#23- since we are on the topic i got a question for you - what is the best way to store rss data inside postgres - will you store it as raw xml directly? or will you process it and store it? - what format will you store it as if stored inside postgres? - how will you handle updates to the feed? rss doesnt do websocket push as far as i can tell so you have to poll which gives you the entire feed with a few items removed…
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Re: Atom is better than RSS, in ways that matter
#24- since we are on the topic i got a question for you - what is the best way to store rss data inside postgres - will you store it as raw xml directly? or will you process it and store it? - what format will you store it as if stored inside postgres? - how will you handle updates to the feed? rss doesnt do websocket push as far as i can tell so you have to poll which gives you the entire feed with a few items removed…
If you're building a RSS reader, you'd probably want to process the data and store all relevant fields as columns for storage. Not much point to storing the XML.
Entries in feeds should have a guid you can use to detect updates/entries you have already seen. RSS readers typically don't delete entries that disappeared from the feed - entries disappear from feeds to limit their size.
You can get live updates to some RSS feeds using WebSub.
Re: Atom is better than RSS, in ways that matter
#25Didn't we get enough of this fight 20 years ago? Let's not piss off Dave Winer again. Reminder: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better
> Gabriel offers the examples of the adoption of C over Lisp, Unix over Lisp machines and VMS, and x86 over reduced instruction set computers as examples of technically worse solutions defeating more elegant ones by arriving to market first. Even (especially?) as a person that appreciates Lisp, Lisp losing this fight twice is kind of funny. Wonder if it’s going to happen an nth time with Guix vs Nix
Worse is better isn't about first to market, it was about simpler beating correct.
Re: Atom is better than RSS, in ways that matter
#26If you publish content, Atom is the superior format. All the parsers support it so there's no argument there against using it. You use it, everything should work just fine. There are no real downsides.
The issue with RSS of course is that there is a lot of really crappy and ancient code out there that should have died a long time ago written in languages like PHP, Ruby, etc. by people who did not really care about details. Details like having unambiguous time stamps (what do you mean, you don't live in my time zone?), or details like "this text is not encoded in UTF-8 but in my unspecified locale specific ASCII variant" (why?!). Or indeed "this description contains malformed tag soup with some of the tags escaped".
Also, while most modern RSS and Atom parsers are pretty decent, it's not that hard to find feeds that still have parsing issues despite these frameworks giving it their best effort. Part of the reason is that the code that generates these feeds is a lot less well covered by frameworks. Lots of content management systems out there that use some wonky templating, home grown scripts, or other improvised shit to generate their feeds. That always was the biggest problem.
Re: Atom is better than RSS, in ways that matter
#27What about activitypub? I thought that was the new format to use..
Re: Atom is better than RSS, in ways that matter
#28- since we are on the topic i got a question for you - what is the best way to store rss data inside postgres - will you store it as raw xml directly? or will you process it and store it? - what format will you store it as if stored inside postgres? - how will you handle updates to the feed? rss doesnt do websocket push as far as i can tell so you have to poll which gives you the entire feed with a few items removed…
If you're building a RSS reader, you'd probably want to process the data and store all relevant fields as columns for storage. Not much point to storing the XML. Entries in feeds should have a guid you can use to detect updates/entries you have already seen. RSS readers typically don't delete entries that disappeared from the feed - entries disappear from feeds to limit their size. You can get live updates to some RS…
- the idea behind storing the raw feed items instead of processed ones is
- what happens if your processing logic changes 6 months down the line?
- for example today you decide you want to remove all extra spaces and lowercase all titles before storing them
- 6 months down the line you want to revert, what now?
Re: Atom is better than RSS, in ways that matter
#29Didn't we get enough of this fight 20 years ago? Let's not piss off Dave Winer again. Reminder: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better
No thanks. We've spent enough decades living in squatter camps built on the ruins of other people's lazy decisions. It's past time to move out now. Worse is worse; worse is shit. And there's nothing endearing or funny about Winer's bad behaviour.
Re: Atom is better than RSS, in ways that matter
#30Didn't we get enough of this fight 20 years ago? Let's not piss off Dave Winer again. Reminder: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better
Isn't this just VHS v Betamax again?
While a worse format surely could have won something like the video wars, it doesn't seem that VHS was in fact the worse format overall: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyKRubB5N60 (Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v019trxfcmg . Quality comparison: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_oJs8-I9WtA ) Beta was basically optimised for one thing, reasonable cassette size, and the tradeoffs turned out probably not to be worth it.