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Atom is better than RSS, in ways that matter

chrismorgan.info

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Re: Atom is better than RSS, in ways that matter

#41

Post by munch117 »

vivzkestrel wrote: post #28
Kwpolska wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Absolutely store the raw data. For the reasons you state.

But also store derived data. Titles, authors, dates, article texts. You need those for whatever your application does. You don't want your application logic to be working with the raw text.

> how will you handle updates to the feed?

When polling, consider using HTTP HEAD to check for changes before GET.

What you do when an article ID reappears with different content, that up to you. I think readers usually replace the old entry with the new content, silently. But it's not the only option.

Re: Atom is better than RSS, in ways that matter

#42

Post by chrismorgan »

kelnos wrote: post #18
ladax72707 wrote: post #16

Most of the online content I consume comes to me either via RSS or Atom (I don't have numbers on the split). Not once have I thought - "Gosh darn it, this blog uses RSS instead of Atom, even though Atom is so obviously the better choice. Now I don't even want to add this blog to my feed." ...

I don't think this article is aimed at consumers, but at developers who might have to write parsers, or people who are trying to decide what feed format to use for their own content. Though you might be upset about RSS being used when your reader screws up with it, because some things are difficult to interpret. Of course, you won't know why it screws up, and you'll probably blame the person who wrote the feed, not t…

As a concrete example: I have been frustrated by title encoding issues on CSS-Tricks (HTML tag names getting broken) multiple times, which would never have occurred if they just used Atom instead of RSS.

Re: Atom is better than RSS, in ways that matter

#44

Post by latexr »

mbirth wrote: post #39
latexr wrote: post #36

Personally, I don’t care at all since we’ve gotten JSON feeds. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSON_Feed Not every programming language I use can output RSS/Atom/XML by default, but pretty much all of them can output JSON natively, no library needed, just fine. The spec is short and easy to understand, to the point it’s little effort to manipulate the feeds, adding to them or consuming them even without a dedicated rea…

But JSON doesn’t allow you to run it through an XSLT and get a normal webpage out of it, does it?

Apparently it does.

https://stackoverflow.com/a/49011455

That’s not something I care about, though. I don’t mean to imply that JSON feeds are objectively superior to RSS and Atom, I just mean to share what my personal observations are, which might be useful to someone else too.

Re: Atom is better than RSS, in ways that matter

#45

Post by chrismorgan »

4ndrewl wrote: post #17
encomiast wrote: post #5

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?

Do video cassette recorders and players support both VHS and Betamax?

Because essentially all feed readers support both Atom and RSS.

Re: Atom is better than RSS, in ways that matter

#46

Post by adrianwaj »

Both really need an explicit "Full/Partial" flag.

Over-polling is also a problem with both formats.

But the Local-First Fediverse is evolving. https://share.gemini.google/NHjiUHtpRTiJ

That's important and will break the walled gardens, and will change money flows I suspect as advertising revenue is more equitably shared with content providers, who themselves can be better paid for content produced and content promised. It's the 'ol centralization decentralization swinging back and forth again.

Re: Atom is better than RSS, in ways that matter

#47

Post by chrismorgan »

tjansen wrote: post #31

I agree that Atom is easier to use and better defined in some ways. But why on earth would you want to put unrestricted HTML in the title in the first place? How is a reader supposed to handle that? It's just a weird thing to allow. In practice, the differences between the syndication formats don't really matter. Today even less than when they were created, as a solution for most of the differences is just a prompt a…

Consider the title of my article: “Atom is better than RSS, in ways that matter”. That emphasis belongs there, and it’s mildly bad to lose it. (For presentation on my own site, I also control the line break position on larger screens; but that wouldn’t be appropriate for feeds, where you can’t control the presentation.)

We accept that sentences can have formatting, and headings can have formatting, so why shouldn’t titles? When you look at titles that get used on platforms like YouTube, there’s obviously a desire for formatting. People use Unicode shenanigans to work around the deficit frequently. (And they do so in ways that are mostly only available for the English script, quite inequitable for other scripts.) Even if you were to restrict it to ASCII, people GLEEFULLY abuse capital letters FOR EMPHASIS!!!!1!

Especially once you get to coding topics, titles need to support , which is important semantics.

(My biggest disappointment with Atom is that text constructs are single-type-only. I wish you could provide distinct text and HTML representations, like email does with the multipart/alternative MIME type. In some places where I use in titles, I’d just drop the … wrapping, in other places I’d turn it into `…`.)

I will write a proper article about all this some time soonish, encouraging people to use markup in titles.

Re: Atom is better than RSS, in ways that matter

#49

Post by tjansen »

mbirth wrote: post #39
latexr wrote: post #36

Personally, I don’t care at all since we’ve gotten JSON feeds. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSON_Feed Not every programming language I use can output RSS/Atom/XML by default, but pretty much all of them can output JSON natively, no library needed, just fine. The spec is short and easy to understand, to the point it’s little effort to manipulate the feeds, adding to them or consuming them even without a dedicated rea…

But JSON doesn’t allow you to run it through an XSLT and get a normal webpage out of it, does it?

I guess it's like you can't transform XML with JSON-T :)

Seriously, yes, the really old XSLT does not support JSON. But these days it is much easier to find tools that read or write JSON than to find decent XML support.

Re: Atom is better than RSS, in ways that matter

#50

Post by [deleted] »

adrianwaj wrote: post #46

Both really need an explicit "Full/Partial" flag. Over-polling is also a problem with both formats. But the Local-First Fediverse is evolving. https://share.gemini.google/NHjiUHtpRTiJ That's important and will break the walled gardens, and will change money flows I suspect as advertising revenue is more equitably shared with content providers, who themselves can be better paid for content produced and content promise…

[deleted]
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