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SoylentNews is people

posted by martyb on Monday January 14 2019, @11:22PM   Printer-friendly
from the not-dead-yet dept.

Motherboard:

About a decade ago, the average internet user might well have heard of RSS. Really Simple Syndication, or Rich Site Summary—what the acronym stands for depends on who you ask—is a standard that websites and podcasts can use to offer a feed of content to their users, one easily understood by lots of different computer programs. Today, though RSS continues to power many applications on the web, it has become, for most people, an obscure technology.

The story of how this happened is really two stories. The first is a story about a broad vision for the web's future that never quite came to fruition. The second is a story about how a collaborative effort to improve a popular standard devolved into one of the most contentious forks in the history of open-source software development.

Who killed RSS?

[NB: SoylentNews supports syndicated feeds — scroll to the bottom of almost any page on the site (for certain it is on the main page) and you will see links to our Atom and RSS feeds. --Ed].


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 2) by darkfeline on Wednesday January 16 2019, @05:09AM

    by darkfeline (1030) on Wednesday January 16 2019, @05:09AM (#787238) Homepage

    No, RSS is a piece of shit. Have you tried implementing a complete RSS client?

    First thing you might do is find the spec doc. Oh wait, there is no spec. Actually, there are two or three different specs. Well, there used to be multiple specs, I hear that now there's a single RSS 2.0 spec. The spec sucks though. You'll have to make sure you support every version of the spec as well. Also, there are lots of RSS providers that don't follow any of those specs, and you have to support them anyway because users will complain.

    Here's post written by someone who has written an RSS client: https://nullprogram.com/blog/2013/09/23/ [nullprogram.com]

    RSS should go die in a fire. Once I finish fixing up my site, I'll be sure to provide Atom and specifically not provide RSS.

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