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My personal gripes with RSS: * No pagination, and in practice it's very inconsistent how many recent posts are included. This makes the feeds only useful for n

by phgn 5y ago

My personal gripes with RSS: * No pagination, and in practice it's very inconsistent how many recent posts are included. This makes the feeds only useful for new things, not as an archive. * I don't actually want the full post content in the main feed, a description for every item would suffice. For a blog like WaitButWhy, the RSS XML is huge.

hwers 5y ago
To play devils advocate, the pagination on e.g. twitter is really crappy too (non existent)
a1371 5y ago
For your first gripe, I think it wouldn't add anything over crawling a website. If you only want to archive the content, with semantic HTML you can easily know where the article is. It seems like a solved problem when browser reader modes can extract the data so well. For your second gripe, perhaps a separate "excerpts" feed would do it. I know some podcasters publish the same content over multiple feeds for this kind of customization.
axby 5y ago
I am a big fan of RSS but I strongly agree with both of your points. I have only used it for checking out new things. Though having the option to fetch the full feed without visiting the website would be a great feature. I use an android app that seems to do that by scraping the site, I love it. That being said, for some reason that escapes me, some news sites don't make it easy to see a list of articles at all (looking at you, https://cbc.ca/news https://cbc.ca/news). And when writing this comment, I see that if you scroll down far enough you can see more articles in this really annoying tile format (the app is better but I hate downloading a ~300 MB app when a <10 MB RSS reader is all I really want). TL;DR: somehow it isn't just RSS but even somewhat publicly funded news sources seem to prey with the "get you stuck in an endless cycle of scrolling while you're trying to find the content you want" trap.
ttepasse 5y ago
Repeating myself: There is a spec for feed pagination. But it depends on opt-in and small work by the feed publisher. https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5005 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5005

by phgn 5y ago

hwers 5y ago

To play devils advocate, the pagination on e.g. twitter is really crappy too (non existent)

a1371 5y ago

For your first gripe, I think it wouldn't add anything over crawling a website. If you only want to archive the content, with semantic HTML you can easily know where the article is. It seems like a solved problem when browser reader modes can extract the data so well. For your second gripe, perhaps a separate "excerpts" feed would do it. I know some podcasters publish the same content over multiple feeds for this kind of customization.

axby 5y ago

I am a big fan of RSS but I strongly agree with both of your points. I have only used it for checking out new things. Though having the option to fetch the full feed without visiting the website would be a great feature. I use an android app that seems to do that by scraping the site, I love it. That being said, for some reason that escapes me, some news sites don't make it easy to see a list of articles at all (looking at you, https://cbc.ca/news https://cbc.ca/news). And when writing this comment, I see that if you scroll down far enough you can see more articles in this really annoying tile format (the app is better but I hate downloading a ~300 MB app when a <10 MB RSS reader is all I really want). TL;DR: somehow it isn't just RSS but even somewhat publicly funded news sources seem to prey with the "get you stuck in an endless cycle of scrolling while you're trying to find the content you want" trap.

ttepasse 5y ago

Repeating myself: There is a spec for feed pagination. But it depends on opt-in and small work by the feed publisher. https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5005 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5005