3 ms·

Nobody cares about feeds anymore

5 points by 0des 5y ago

0des 5y ago
This was originally a piece that I wrote for Software Engineering Daily that never got picked up, so I put it on HackMD and posted it here in hopes to generate some discussion around feeds. It's something I'm passionate about and want to talk to more folks who feel the same way. Any comments, crits, discussions are welcome. I hope this at the least generates some ideas for the next iteration of the spec.
PaulHoule 5y ago
Sometimes you are better off when something doesn’t have a brand. If feeds had a brand you’d have hucksters who think they can make a $1 billion company off them. It could be bought by Facebook and Google. If you make advances at OSI level 6 and 8 you might not need to standardize things. People have really gotten it wrong that the semantic web was about standardizing the formats people publish, but it was really about standardizing logic for data aggregation. They developed logics that are highly scalable (OWL RL/DL) but didn’t include essential features but never listened to end users about it and succumbed to standards fatigue before the job was done. (Ex. People are going to publish temperatures in centigrade, Fahrenheit, and Kelvin but rdfs:subPropertyOf can’t do the very simple math to convert) I spent weeks developing a wikimedia markup parser that never really worked right, but then I took a ‘parse html to dom and apply knowledge about url structure’ program I’d written for Flickr out of mothballs, found it extracted some metadata without modification and had it getting ‘enough’ in 15 minutes.
- 0des 5y ago
  Thanks for checking it out! To be clear, there's nothing for sale here. It's MIT licensed, anybody can de-brand it and use it as they want- the main draw for me is that some day I want to be able to have these features available to me, however it happens, and by any name. If the spec evolves into being a not-spec, I'm fine with that too, I'm just a diehard podcast person who wants the experience to be a little bit better, and the purpose of the spec was to illustrate one way that could take form. Thanks again for checking it out and taking time to comment.

5 points by 0des 5y ago

0des 5y ago

This was originally a piece that I wrote for Software Engineering Daily that never got picked up, so I put it on HackMD and posted it here in hopes to generate some discussion around feeds. It's something I'm passionate about and want to talk to more folks who feel the same way. Any comments, crits, discussions are welcome. I hope this at the least generates some ideas for the next iteration of the spec.

PaulHoule 5y ago

Sometimes you are better off when something doesn’t have a brand. If feeds had a brand you’d have hucksters who think they can make a $1 billion company off them. It could be bought by Facebook and Google. If you make advances at OSI level 6 and 8 you might not need to standardize things. People have really gotten it wrong that the semantic web was about standardizing the formats people publish, but it was really about standardizing logic for data aggregation. They developed logics that are highly scalable (OWL RL/DL) but didn’t include essential features but never listened to end users about it and succumbed to standards fatigue before the job was done. (Ex. People are going to publish temperatures in centigrade, Fahrenheit, and Kelvin but rdfs:subPropertyOf can’t do the very simple math to convert) I spent weeks developing a wikimedia markup parser that never really worked right, but then I took a ‘parse html to dom and apply knowledge about url structure’ program I’d written for Flickr out of mothballs, found it extracted some metadata without modification and had it getting ‘enough’ in 15 minutes.

0des 5y ago
Thanks for checking it out! To be clear, there's nothing for sale here. It's MIT licensed, anybody can de-brand it and use it as they want- the main draw for me is that some day I want to be able to have these features available to me, however it happens, and by any name. If the spec evolves into being a not-spec, I'm fine with that too, I'm just a diehard podcast person who wants the experience to be a little bit better, and the purpose of the spec was to illustrate one way that could take form. Thanks again for checking it out and taking time to comment.