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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

#61

Post by DonHopkins »

Who remembers when everybody was syndicating all their favorite RSS feeds on their own blogs, and then some joker posted a blog entry to his own RSS feed with a title like "What happens when you put an unbalanced tag into the title?", and the ENTIRE BLOGOSPHERE started blinking?

The content of that notorious discussion went on and off and on and off for weeks, giving all the netizens of the RSS community blogosphere terrible headaches, with people's entire blogs disappearing and reappearing every second, until it finally reached a flashing point, when Dave Winer humbly conceded that it wasn't the user's fault for being an idiot, and maybe just maybe there was tiny teeny little design flaw in RSS, and it wasn't actually such a great idea to allow HTML tags in RSS titles.

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

#62

Post by DonHopkins »

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

I used to be on Dave Winer's scripting-news mailing list, and then somebody posted a request to be removed, so he removed them in a huff and then complained about how they hurt his feelings to the rest of the mailing list (not that they spammed the list, but that he was insulted they wanted off).

After that, I was afraid to ask him to remove me too! I think I finally just moved on to another email address.

There's supposed to be a mailing-list-name-REQUEST email address just for administrative questions like that, but so many people now don't even know or support that, and just send removal requests to the whole list. Instead of complaining about people asking the whole mailing list to be removed, there's a much better passive aggressive strategy:

My favorite instance of emergent mailing list behavior was when a trouble maker named GUMBY created a "PLEASE-REMOVE-ME" mailing list, just for people who sent email to another entire mailing list asking to be removed from it, instead of sending their request to the administrator at mailing-list-name-REQUEST.

Whenever somebody would make that faux-pas, he'd add them to the PLEASE-REMOVE-ME mailing list, and the emergent behavior was that those people would discuss amongst themselves the fact that they really wanted to be removed from the PLEASE-REMOVE-ME mailing list, until they eventually learned that the way to get removed from a mailing list was to simply send email to PLEASE-REMOVE-ME-REQUEST, instead of the entire mailing list.

Worked like a charm!

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

#63

Post by DonHopkins »

notpushkin wrote: post #35
humanfromearth9 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only the porn industry can answer that question.

Contrary to the popular belief, you can get porn on Atom.

At least you don't get fined for forgetting to rewind you Atom feed.

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

#64

Post by paulryanrogers »

vivzkestrel wrote: post #59
munch117 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

so how do you store raw xml data in postgres?

As text or XML column type. IME a document store or columnar backend is significantly cheaper if you're not querying it from SQL.

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

#65

Post by Matumio »

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…

I agree with Gemin— wait. Did you just post a link to google.com to support an argument for self-hosting, decentralization and breaking monopolies...?

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

#66

Post by inigyou »

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…

> 403. That’s an error.

> Your client does not have permission to get URL /share/d8748f435799 from this server. That’s all we know.

What's this link meant to be about?

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

#67

Post by throw0101a »

Vinnl wrote: post #22

tl;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.

> Some podcast apps (Apple Podcasts) don't support Atom, so then plain RSS is better.

Apple Podcasts stopped supporting Atom (sadly) a few years ago:

* https://podcasters.apple.com/4115-technical-updates-for-host...

Not sure why they decided to do so (lack of volume/traffic?).

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

#68

Post by inigyou »

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?

A reader does things in realtime. You don't care what happened 6 months ago. If you did something 6 months ago you don't want to gaslight the user by pretending you did something different 6 months ago.

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

#69

Post by inigyou »

vivzkestrel wrote: post #9

- 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…

For polling, the ultimate test is whether Rachel likes it. Check this and her other posts: https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2026/02/23/readers/

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

#70

Post by adrianwaj »

inigyou wrote: post #66
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…

> 403. That’s an error. > Your client does not have permission to get URL /share/d8748f435799 from this server. That’s all we know. What's this link meant to be about?

https://share.gemini.google/aHYGlJzhFHSx

https://imgur.com/PQICt6I

RSS or Atom - do they indicate whether they are providing a full or partial feed?

What is federated content?

Can the Fediverse be local-first?

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