5 ms·

My perils with rss: 1. Too many formats, it's been 20 years since something changed in RSS formats, we should know by now what we need. Also rdf is really ugly

by dvh 5y ago

My perils with rss: 1. Too many formats, it's been 20 years since something changed in RSS formats, we should know by now what we need. Also rdf is really ugly. We should make one final rss format and switch to it. 2. There are no rules for guids. No maximal length, I've seen guids several kb long in the wild. Integer guids would be perfect (but uuid or some hash is fine too, just agree on some maximal length ffs). 3. no history standard, if site owner decides to show you 20 items and you go on vacation, when you return there will be 20 new items and the rest will be lost. I'm thinking something like ?limit=200 or even better ?since=5257 (some last seen guid) 4. Sites not putting entire article in, only summary. 5. Sites putting page navigation ui in articles. 6. Pages lacking RSS feed entirely.

ekidd 5y ago
> We should make one final rss format and switch to it. This was the motivation for creating the last several versions of RSS and Atom, if I remember correctly! Sometimes I wonder if the RSS situation was the original inspiration for https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/. Anyway, RSS parsing is a solved problem in most major languages. Just look for a prominent open source library that handles all the major format variations, and call it a day. It's not like real-world RSS feeds actually comply with any of the standards, anyway. Most parsers need fallbacks and bits of autodetection. ("Is this escaped HTML or plain text or what?") (Full disclosure: I worked on a number of RSS-related projects back in the day and worked with at least one person involved in one of the standardizion attempts.)
kkfx 5y ago
Personally: - lack of the entire article in the feed, Miniflux and some others try to download it if needed but does not work flawlessly; - lack of RSS/atom support at all for few but not so few websites; - long push against RSS by Big&Powerful that makes too many simply not anymore aware of it's existence, to a point that for many site that still have RSS finding the feed URL from the page source is the sole way to discover it. The rest is far less dangerous IMVHO :-)
rascul 5y ago
> 4. Sites not putting entire article in, only summary. I prefer the summary and a link.
breischl 5y ago
Oh man, the perils are endless. Back when I worked on an RSS aggregator I wrote a list. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cvq67iQpk2C7ufOsefsfKnGCXeUIv46NQHbnHkm8PtU/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cvq67iQpk2C7ufOsefsfKnGC... A few comments on your list: 2. People got suuuuuper confused about this. I agree several kB is too long, though I could see a case for allowing a (reasonable length) URL, as that's a natural ID in some environments. 3. Yeah, basically if there's a fast rate of publishing relative to feed length you have issues. Another way to handle this would be to say the feed must have the last X days of content, and interested readers have to check back at least that often. Not a problem for always-on aggregator sites, though it could be an issue for occasionally-connected clients (eg, smartphone standalone app) 4. To be fair that's a feature in a lot of cases. Some sites have to monetize content somehow or other. 5. Or share buttons... 6. IKR?! For all my complaints I still wish RSS was used more!

by dvh 5y ago

ekidd 5y ago

> We should make one final rss format and switch to it. This was the motivation for creating the last several versions of RSS and Atom, if I remember correctly! Sometimes I wonder if the RSS situation was the original inspiration for https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/. Anyway, RSS parsing is a solved problem in most major languages. Just look for a prominent open source library that handles all the major format variations, and call it a day. It's not like real-world RSS feeds actually comply with any of the standards, anyway. Most parsers need fallbacks and bits of autodetection. ("Is this escaped HTML or plain text or what?") (Full disclosure: I worked on a number of RSS-related projects back in the day and worked with at least one person involved in one of the standardizion attempts.)

kkfx 5y ago

Personally: - lack of the entire article in the feed, Miniflux and some others try to download it if needed but does not work flawlessly; - lack of RSS/atom support at all for few but not so few websites; - long push against RSS by Big&Powerful that makes too many simply not anymore aware of it's existence, to a point that for many site that still have RSS finding the feed URL from the page source is the sole way to discover it. The rest is far less dangerous IMVHO :-)

rascul 5y ago

> 4. Sites not putting entire article in, only summary. I prefer the summary and a link.

breischl 5y ago

Oh man, the perils are endless. Back when I worked on an RSS aggregator I wrote a list. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cvq67iQpk2C7ufOsefsfKnGCXeUIv46NQHbnHkm8PtU/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cvq67iQpk2C7ufOsefsfKnGC... A few comments on your list: 2. People got suuuuuper confused about this. I agree several kB is too long, though I could see a case for allowing a (reasonable length) URL, as that's a natural ID in some environments. 3. Yeah, basically if there's a fast rate of publishing relative to feed length you have issues. Another way to handle this would be to say the feed must have the last X days of content, and interested readers have to check back at least that often. Not a problem for always-on aggregator sites, though it could be an issue for occasionally-connected clients (eg, smartphone standalone app) 4. To be fair that's a feature in a lot of cases. Some sites have to monetize content somehow or other. 5. Or share buttons... 6. IKR?! For all my complaints I still wish RSS was used more!