4 ms·

Very large websites aside, the RSS offer on most of the web is pretty appaling. Standards are not followed or followed poorly. Things like publication dates tha

Very large websites aside, the RSS offer on most of the web is pretty appaling. Standards are not followed or followed poorly. Things like publication dates that are actually the upload date and completely unrelated to the date the content went online, or images that are loaded by html embedded in the description field in nonstandard ways, or sometimes in the image field, or not at all... Or it's the wrong image, because the feed is provided automatically and doesn't have the intelligence to correctly parse the content... That said, if Firefox hadn't hidden live bookmarks away several years ago they might see more use. The small subset of users who bothered to look for them and bring them back to the toolbar might even overlike the set of users who disable telemetry, too.

PaulHoule 8y ago
I have been through this Wikipedia vs DBpedia, any kind of case where there is the primary product (which is part of quality control loops; bugs in the HTML get fixed) vs secondary products (RDF/RSS bugs don't get reported never mind fixed.) Part of the solution is this sort of A.I. http://ontology2.com/essays/ClassifyingHackerNewsArticles/ http://ontology2.com/essays/ClassifyingHackerNewsArticles/ but trained by you and not some other person who is training it to control your behavior.
ehnto 8y ago
I'm not sure it would be any different for any other feed specification unless the spec maintainer supplies all the software. It's a human problem rather than a software/spec problem. But I agree of course, it's a bit of a mess and definitely not something you can rely on to use in automated systems without a lot of extra validation.
Sophira 8y ago
There's an article from 14 years ago that I remember to this day, mainly for the immortal line "RSS 2.0 is incompatible with itself": http://www.diveintomark.link/2004/the-myth-of-rss-compatibility http://www.diveintomark.link/2004/the-myth-of-rss-compatibil... It goes into some detail about the various RSS incompatibilities and is well worth the read, because RSS never really got any better even afterwards.
- gregknicholson 8y ago
  Perhaps with hindsight Atom should have been called RSS 3.0.
slacka 8y ago
If anything hiding live bookmarks was a favor to RSS. Anyone who was introduced to RSS through live bookmarks would think RSS was a horrible idea. It was the worst RSS implementation I've ever tried or experienced.

PaulHoule 8y ago

I have been through this Wikipedia vs DBpedia, any kind of case where there is the primary product (which is part of quality control loops; bugs in the HTML get fixed) vs secondary products (RDF/RSS bugs don't get reported never mind fixed.) Part of the solution is this sort of A.I. http://ontology2.com/essays/ClassifyingHackerNewsArticles/ http://ontology2.com/essays/ClassifyingHackerNewsArticles/ but trained by you and not some other person who is training it to control your behavior.

ehnto 8y ago

I'm not sure it would be any different for any other feed specification unless the spec maintainer supplies all the software. It's a human problem rather than a software/spec problem. But I agree of course, it's a bit of a mess and definitely not something you can rely on to use in automated systems without a lot of extra validation.

Sophira 8y ago

There's an article from 14 years ago that I remember to this day, mainly for the immortal line "RSS 2.0 is incompatible with itself": http://www.diveintomark.link/2004/the-myth-of-rss-compatibility http://www.diveintomark.link/2004/the-myth-of-rss-compatibil... It goes into some detail about the various RSS incompatibilities and is well worth the read, because RSS never really got any better even afterwards.

gregknicholson 8y ago
Perhaps with hindsight Atom should have been called RSS 3.0.

slacka 8y ago

If anything hiding live bookmarks was a favor to RSS. Anyone who was introduced to RSS through live bookmarks would think RSS was a horrible idea. It was the worst RSS implementation I've ever tried or experienced.