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The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS

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Re: The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS

#121

Post by ttepasse »

CharlesW wrote: post #30
spc476 wrote: post #6

A point not mentioned was Dave Winer's refusal to clarify if excerpts in his version of RSS feed needed to be plain text or contain HTML (either as HTML tags or entity encoded). He just kept saying "Keep it simple, people!"

There's no concept of an "excerpt" in RSS, but if we're talking item descriptions, the RSS 2.0 spec says that HTML is allowed and provides examples. http://www.rssboard.org/rss-encoding-examples

Those examples came later than Dave Winer's stewardship. Those were made by the RSS Board which is its own point of weirdness in RSS' history.

Re: The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS

#122

Post by walterbell »

rimliu wrote: post #120
walterbell wrote: post #109

What's the best iOS RSS reader for iPad (split view support) and iPhone, which manages a local-only database of RSS subscriptions, without requiring iCloud or other cloud-based login and surveillance?

iCloud has surveillance now? Interesting.

https://money.cnn.com/2016/02/22/technology/apple-privacy-ic...

> Apple's stance on privacy and security applies only if you don't back up your data to iCloud ... In the first half of 2015, police agencies around the globe asked to explore 4,472 Apple customer accounts, according to the company. Apple disclosed data to police on 1,886 them, of which 1,407 were provided to law enforcement in the United States. In these instances, Apple gave investigators contents of customer iCloud, iTunes and Game Center accounts. Apple didn't always turn over the information. It objected 401 times in all.

Re: The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS

#123

Post by tannhaeuser »

clacke2 wrote: post #118
tannhaeuser wrote: post #92

With the EU parliament's recent voting in favour of requiring consent/royalties for "rich linking" (eg. previewing content without sending the user to the original site), I can see a renaissance for RSS as an accepted and practical means for federated personal news aggregation. But then for me and many others, RSS has never gone away. While we are at it, we should also bring back Usenet/nntp (though obviously I have…

> With the EU parliament's recent voting in favour of requiring consent/royalties for "rich linking" (eg. previewing content without sending the user to the original site), I can see a renaissance for RSS as an accepted and practical means for federated personal news aggregation. That's funny, I see the same legislation as the death of all unauthorized RSS aggregation. The "link tax" provision isn't about links, it's…

But with RSS you're receiving content directly from the publisher's site. There's no third-party involved, and the publisher can provide as many text bites as desired. There is no problem there as long as no content aggregation web site is acting as middleman.

Re: The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS

#124

Post by kakarot »

fredsir wrote: post #108
kakarot wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use RSS for webcomics as well as visiting the actual websites, but a few things: 1. You miss out on the aesthetics each comic's website brings to the table 2. Sometimes you miss things like "hidden panels" or blog posts you're interested in. 3. No advertisement money going towards the artists (Not a big deal if you support them by buying merch and the comics don't need a lot of bandwidth) I would really love to dev…

I don't think 1., 2., and 3. is applicable to at least how I use my RSS reader. Also, I don't understand why that is not the norm... The way I use my RSS reader is that I scroll through the list of posts, and if it's something I wish to check back on later, I press the shortcut to send it to instapaper, and if it's something I wish to check now, I press the shortcut to open it in a new tab, and then I go on. When I'm…

It sounds like you are using RSS as a way to generalize your access to each provider, but only as a delivery mechanism. The viewing is still done in the browser.

With the exception of web apps / extensions, it's my understanding that RSS feeds were originally meant to be consumed by a program specifically optimized for handling feeds, instead of a bloated, slow, unsafe web browser.

In the end, your RSS flow could mostly be replaced by a set of live bookmarks in your bookmark toolbar, then you wouldn't even have to leave the browser. Plus you would get easy multi-platform synchronization of your feeds. A hell of a lot easier than running an RSS reader on a private server like a lot of us.

Re: The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS

#125

Post by rcxdude »

fredsir wrote: post #108
kakarot wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use RSS for webcomics as well as visiting the actual websites, but a few things: 1. You miss out on the aesthetics each comic's website brings to the table 2. Sometimes you miss things like "hidden panels" or blog posts you're interested in. 3. No advertisement money going towards the artists (Not a big deal if you support them by buying merch and the comics don't need a lot of bandwidth) I would really love to dev…

I don't think 1., 2., and 3. is applicable to at least how I use my RSS reader. Also, I don't understand why that is not the norm... The way I use my RSS reader is that I scroll through the list of posts, and if it's something I wish to check back on later, I press the shortcut to send it to instapaper, and if it's something I wish to check now, I press the shortcut to open it in a new tab, and then I go on. When I'm…

This is how I use RSS as well. I wound up writing my own self-hosted RSS reader which is extremely simple and supports this workflow.

Re: The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS

#126

Post by jwilk »

clacke2 wrote: post #117

> Maybe RSS could have been extended somehow so that friends subscribed to the same channel could syndicate their thoughts about an article to each other. @dang Congratulations, you just invented OStatus. :-) OStatus is a combination of Atom+ActivityStreams+Salmon+WebFinger+WebSub for exactly this purpose. It was created in 2009 and was even partially used by Google Buzz. I could post something on identi.ca and see i…

dang?

Re: The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS

#127

Post by nicolaslem »

avhon1 wrote: post #34
RandomInteger4 wrote: post #19

RSS is a nice format, but it'd be even nicer as json. Recently had a client that needed me to read their RSS feed into email templates and update their template after they switched their email service. First time working with RSS. 10/10, would do so again.

> [RSS would] be even nicer as json. Already a standard! https://jsonfeed.org/

I recently added support for JSON feed in my feed reader and blog. After playing with it for a while, I doubt it will be a wildly supported standard.

- It is really just RSS/Atom wrapped in JSON. Sure it changes a few names, makes some elements mandatory and other elements optional but overall it does not attempt to fix core problems (consistent item IDs to avoid reruns, embedding messy HTML with relative links...).

- Besides a dozen of JSON feeds mentioned in the documentation or in the Github repo, there are very few feeds published in the wild.

- Its authors seem to have kind of given up already, a lot of open issues and PRs but not much happening.

Don't get me wrong, I'd like a successor to come and fix the issues that RSS and Atom have but this successor would need much more traction than what JSON feed has.

Re: The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS

#128

Post by extra88 »

walterbell wrote: post #107
ehnto wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FB couldn't collect data on your usage from an RSS feed, which is what they use to drive their advertising platform, which you are also not participating in. So having you read outside of FBs site or app is not in their best interests.

You would think that small and upcoming social media sites would support RSS, at least to attract users. Apparently Mastodon generates an Atom RSS feed for every user, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16755553

Twitter used to have RSS feeds for every user. I still follow a few accounts using code that converts them to RSS but I probably would not have bothered if I didn't already have a Twitter API key.

Re: The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS

#129

Post by rimliu »

walterbell wrote: post #122
rimliu wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

iCloud has surveillance now? Interesting.

https://money.cnn.com/2016/02/22/technology/apple-privacy-ic... > Apple's stance on privacy and security applies only if you don't back up your data to iCloud ... In the first half of 2015, police agencies around the globe asked to explore 4,472 Apple customer accounts, according to the company. Apple disclosed data to police on 1,886 them, of which 1,407 were provided to law enforcement in the United States. In thes…

This is no more surveillance than police coming to your house with a search warrant is though.

Re: The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS

#130

Post by noirscape »

I miss Apples native RSS readers (Safari and Mail used to have native readers, with Mail being configurable to send you RSS feeds to your inbox). Sadly they dropped them with Lion if I'm not mistaken.

RSS is/was nice to be able to stay up-to-date with infrequently updating blogs, and it's honestly a shame that it's no longer used as much as it used to.

One thing that could possibly re-ignite the use of RSS feeds is a button in the adress bar (I recall Safari having this option) to indicate that the site has an RSS feed and taking you to it when you click on it. Maybe look in a couple of predetermined places to find this feed (feed.xml and rss.xml are almost universally the common feed names I've seen used on the sites that I frequent, with the exception of reddit, which simply lets you append .rss to any URL).

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