6 ms·

Question the W3C's advice re RSS

30 points by ajdude 3y ago

gerikson 3y ago
I suggest using Atom instead and avoiding a whole lot of confusion and drama by not implementing RSS 2.0.
- kevincox 3y ago
  I suggest publishing with Atom. However if you are consuming feeds you will probably want to support RSS 2.0 as well as various buggy implementations and some earlier RSS versions.
- chrismorgan 3y ago
  Yep. Use RSS if you’re dealing with podcasting, because most of those platforms don’t support Atom (and it’s basically all Apple’s fault—they took over and froze the space at a certain point in time just before Atom became popular and fixed up the mess that was RSS), but use Atom for all other feeds, because it’s just hands-down better than RSS, in ways that occasionally even matter (as in, will cause some software to mangle your content, most commonly your titles if you use stuff that could look like HTML).
  - throw0101a 3y ago
    A requirements update from August 2022: > Apple Podcasts will make the following updates to RSS feed requirements in 2023: […] > Atom feeds > Update: No longer supported > New shows in Atom feed format will no longer be accepted and any remaining shows will no longer be updated. * https://podcasters.apple.com/4115-technical-updates-for-hosting-providers https://podcasters.apple.com/4115-technical-updates-for-host... WTF Apple? AFAICT Google Podcasts is doing the same as Apple and only using RSS 2.0. Nothing is stopping people from providing both RSS 2.0 and Atom, and given that most feeds are probably auto-generated, probably not hard to do so, but it is disappointing.
    - CharlesW 3y ago
      Apple and Google did this because (1) alternative feed formats like Atom or JSON Feed weren't being used, and (2) a few years ago, the podcasting industry and standards bodies chose to require RSS for extensions/enhancements.
      - JohnFen 3y ago
        > alternative feed formats like Atom or JSON Feed weren't being used What? I think about half of the RSS feeds I subscribe to are Atom-based.
        chrismorgan 3y ago
        (You’re making me cringe, calling Atom feeds RSS feeds. Just “feeds” is a perfectly good word.)
        JohnFen 3y ago
        Sorry about that. I didn't know that was a thing that made people cringe.
        chrismorgan 3y ago
        Feeds are the generic concept, and RSS and Atom are two different implementations of the concept. It’s like googling something using Bing.
        CharlesW 3y ago
        > I think about half of the RSS feeds I subscribe to are Atom-based. Meaning, they have an `atom` namespace declaration? Because that's very common in RSS feeds, and is required for Podcast Standards Project-compliant feeds. Apple supports RSS feeds that use the `atom` namespace.
        JohnFen 3y ago
  - CharlesW 3y ago
    Podcasting uses RSS because alternatives like Atom and JSON Feed don't solve a problem in this space. New podcasting standards (Podcast Standards Project, Podcasting 2.0) are supported by extending RSS, which is now explicitly required. (Apple is just a consumer of RSS — they don't use RSS between their back-end and their podcast app.)
    - chrismorgan 3y ago
      RSS is an awful mess. Atom was invented in significant part to fix the problems of RSS (things like the content encoding disaster), and it succeeded. Except that, while everyone else accepted it (most things use Atom rather than RSS, admittedly with a few rather notable and massive holdouts), the podcasting industry ignored it. The way RSS and especially podcasting RSS just pulls in bits and pieces from everywhere haphazardly, regularly ending up expressing the same thing three or four times, is an indictment against it. And if making <atom:link> mandatory doesn’t make you boggle (pulling in one element from the competing and superior standard, in what is at the very least a very mild abuse of the XML namespace—not that RSS cares about XML conventions on namespaces), nothing will.
- safety1st 3y ago
  The drama around it is awkward, but I think Winer has a point about the success of RSS being at least partially attributable to it not changing. The immediate analogy that springs to mind is email, also archaic, also widely adopted, you don't have to fear that there will be breaking changes or some company will decide it's going away tomorrow. You just use it and it works. (RSS actually had that apocalyptic moment when Google Reader shut down, did it die? Nope.) The net result is that RSS is low maintenance, the implementations out there are stable and have been around for years, very little work needs to be done on code which deals with RSS, millions of websites continue using it and no one has to lose any sleep over it. Not that I wouldn't like to see any improvements at all. It would be nice if these guys could set aside their differences and say look, we'll do an update of some kind and increment the major version by 1, say, every 10-15 years. Yes that's practically glacial in Internet time, maybe that's actually good.
ajdude 3y ago
Related: W3C and My RSS Spec (scripting.com) 27 points by Tomte 8 days ago | 21 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36377953 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36377953
ajdude 3y ago
I'll summarize my thoughts mentioned in the Github issue[1]: > I think this comes down to who W3C considers the authority for RSS2 today. > While from a technical standpoint [both Dave's and RSSBoard's spec] are identical, they do have some differences .... and if rssboard comes up with a new donations attribute for <item> and the Harvard site doesn't list it, which copy should W3C run their validator against? [1] https://github.com/w3c/feedvalidator/issues/106 https://github.com/w3c/feedvalidator/issues/106
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
politelemon 3y ago
The entire Github thread felt unpleasant to read due to (what I perceived as) the passive aggressive responses. In a way it solidifies my choice to go with ATOM for my org rather than RSS, there's too much confusion for end-implementers in this space. https://github.com/w3c/feedvalidator/issues/106 https://github.com/w3c/feedvalidator/issues/106
brycewray 3y ago
No HTTPS for this site? :-/
- CharlesW 3y ago
  http://scripting.com/2014/08/08/myBlogDoesntNeedHttps.html http://scripting.com/2014/08/08/myBlogDoesntNeedHttps.html
  - brycewray 3y ago
    Ah. Thanks, wasn’t aware. (In 2014, he might have had a tiny point --- but, now... Hmm.)
    - jerf 3y ago
      It's still not the easiest to come up with an attack of consequence against what is basically a static site that is worth an attacker's time. You can draw out scenarios, certainly, but most of them are some combination of "doesn't matter" and "if that's the goal, there's a better and easier way to do it". I ran on that philosophy for a long time too, but Let's Encrypt tipped the balance for me. When TLS certs cost real money it was easy to decide that the super-marginal security benefits for my minimal readers weren't worth hundreds of my dollars a year. Now it's more on the order of "incidental noise in what it took to set the website up anyhow", so I go for it.
- raspyberr 3y ago
  What would you have gained from reading the site in HTTPS?
  - mcherm 3y ago
    Confidence that Verizon (my internet service provider) would not know what article I was reading (although they would still know what servers I was connecting to) and would not be selling that information to anyone.
evmar 3y ago
It's incredible that this person is still reliably trying to stir up drama about RSS after twenty years.
squirtlebonflow 3y ago
Who uses RSS and for what? Nobody I know uses it
- waste_monk 3y ago
  Have you ever used it? It used to be a really nice way to consume content... instead of having to check every blog/webcomic/whatever individually, you could have a folder of RSS feeds in your browser and sweep over them to see at a glance if anything new had been posted. Or you could have a dedicated RSS reader that would do stuff for you such as archiving content for offline use, search indexing, etc. I am still deeply annoyed that RSS has fallen out of popular use.
- rchaud 3y ago
  If you have ever used a podcast app, you've used RSS. The exception being if your only podcast listening is through private apps like Spotify.
- myaccountonhn 3y ago
  I've recently converted to it and can't believe I didn't sooner. It's a very nice way to get news from different sources. I started to use it after getting off reddit, and now have it to receive the latest news from Hackernews, pl discourses, lemmy communities and more.

30 points by ajdude 3y ago

gerikson 3y ago

I suggest using Atom instead and avoiding a whole lot of confusion and drama by not implementing RSS 2.0.

kevincox 3y ago
I suggest publishing with Atom. However if you are consuming feeds you will probably want to support RSS 2.0 as well as various buggy implementations and some earlier RSS versions.
chrismorgan 3y ago
Yep. Use RSS if you’re dealing with podcasting, because most of those platforms don’t support Atom (and it’s basically all Apple’s fault—they took over and froze the space at a certain point in time just before Atom became popular and fixed up the mess that was RSS), but use Atom for all other feeds, because it’s just hands-down better than RSS, in ways that occasionally even matter (as in, will cause some software to mangle your content, most commonly your titles if you use stuff that could look like HTML).
- throw0101a 3y ago
  A requirements update from August 2022: > Apple Podcasts will make the following updates to RSS feed requirements in 2023: […] > Atom feeds > Update: No longer supported > New shows in Atom feed format will no longer be accepted and any remaining shows will no longer be updated. * https://podcasters.apple.com/4115-technical-updates-for-hosting-providers https://podcasters.apple.com/4115-technical-updates-for-host... WTF Apple? AFAICT Google Podcasts is doing the same as Apple and only using RSS 2.0. Nothing is stopping people from providing both RSS 2.0 and Atom, and given that most feeds are probably auto-generated, probably not hard to do so, but it is disappointing.
  - CharlesW 3y ago
    Apple and Google did this because (1) alternative feed formats like Atom or JSON Feed weren't being used, and (2) a few years ago, the podcasting industry and standards bodies chose to require RSS for extensions/enhancements.
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      > alternative feed formats like Atom or JSON Feed weren't being used What? I think about half of the RSS feeds I subscribe to are Atom-based.
      - chrismorgan 3y ago
        (You’re making me cringe, calling Atom feeds RSS feeds. Just “feeds” is a perfectly good word.)
        JohnFen 3y ago
        Sorry about that. I didn't know that was a thing that made people cringe.
        chrismorgan 3y ago
        Feeds are the generic concept, and RSS and Atom are two different implementations of the concept. It’s like googling something using Bing.
      - CharlesW 3y ago
        > I think about half of the RSS feeds I subscribe to are Atom-based. Meaning, they have an `atom` namespace declaration? Because that's very common in RSS feeds, and is required for Podcast Standards Project-compliant feeds. Apple supports RSS feeds that use the `atom` namespace.
        JohnFen 3y ago
- CharlesW 3y ago
  Podcasting uses RSS because alternatives like Atom and JSON Feed don't solve a problem in this space. New podcasting standards (Podcast Standards Project, Podcasting 2.0) are supported by extending RSS, which is now explicitly required. (Apple is just a consumer of RSS — they don't use RSS between their back-end and their podcast app.)
  - chrismorgan 3y ago
    RSS is an awful mess. Atom was invented in significant part to fix the problems of RSS (things like the content encoding disaster), and it succeeded. Except that, while everyone else accepted it (most things use Atom rather than RSS, admittedly with a few rather notable and massive holdouts), the podcasting industry ignored it. The way RSS and especially podcasting RSS just pulls in bits and pieces from everywhere haphazardly, regularly ending up expressing the same thing three or four times, is an indictment against it. And if making <atom:link> mandatory doesn’t make you boggle (pulling in one element from the competing and superior standard, in what is at the very least a very mild abuse of the XML namespace—not that RSS cares about XML conventions on namespaces), nothing will.
safety1st 3y ago
The drama around it is awkward, but I think Winer has a point about the success of RSS being at least partially attributable to it not changing. The immediate analogy that springs to mind is email, also archaic, also widely adopted, you don't have to fear that there will be breaking changes or some company will decide it's going away tomorrow. You just use it and it works. (RSS actually had that apocalyptic moment when Google Reader shut down, did it die? Nope.) The net result is that RSS is low maintenance, the implementations out there are stable and have been around for years, very little work needs to be done on code which deals with RSS, millions of websites continue using it and no one has to lose any sleep over it. Not that I wouldn't like to see any improvements at all. It would be nice if these guys could set aside their differences and say look, we'll do an update of some kind and increment the major version by 1, say, every 10-15 years. Yes that's practically glacial in Internet time, maybe that's actually good.

ajdude 3y ago

Related: W3C and My RSS Spec (scripting.com) 27 points by Tomte 8 days ago | 21 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36377953 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36377953

ajdude 3y ago

I'll summarize my thoughts mentioned in the Github issue[1]: > I think this comes down to who W3C considers the authority for RSS2 today. > While from a technical standpoint [both Dave's and RSSBoard's spec] are identical, they do have some differences .... and if rssboard comes up with a new donations attribute for <item> and the Harvard site doesn't list it, which copy should W3C run their validator against? [1] https://github.com/w3c/feedvalidator/issues/106 https://github.com/w3c/feedvalidator/issues/106

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

politelemon 3y ago

The entire Github thread felt unpleasant to read due to (what I perceived as) the passive aggressive responses. In a way it solidifies my choice to go with ATOM for my org rather than RSS, there's too much confusion for end-implementers in this space. https://github.com/w3c/feedvalidator/issues/106 https://github.com/w3c/feedvalidator/issues/106

brycewray 3y ago

No HTTPS for this site? :-/

CharlesW 3y ago
http://scripting.com/2014/08/08/myBlogDoesntNeedHttps.html http://scripting.com/2014/08/08/myBlogDoesntNeedHttps.html
- brycewray 3y ago
  Ah. Thanks, wasn’t aware. (In 2014, he might have had a tiny point --- but, now... Hmm.)
  - jerf 3y ago
    It's still not the easiest to come up with an attack of consequence against what is basically a static site that is worth an attacker's time. You can draw out scenarios, certainly, but most of them are some combination of "doesn't matter" and "if that's the goal, there's a better and easier way to do it". I ran on that philosophy for a long time too, but Let's Encrypt tipped the balance for me. When TLS certs cost real money it was easy to decide that the super-marginal security benefits for my minimal readers weren't worth hundreds of my dollars a year. Now it's more on the order of "incidental noise in what it took to set the website up anyhow", so I go for it.
raspyberr 3y ago
What would you have gained from reading the site in HTTPS?
- mcherm 3y ago
  Confidence that Verizon (my internet service provider) would not know what article I was reading (although they would still know what servers I was connecting to) and would not be selling that information to anyone.

evmar 3y ago

It's incredible that this person is still reliably trying to stir up drama about RSS after twenty years.

squirtlebonflow 3y ago

Who uses RSS and for what? Nobody I know uses it

waste_monk 3y ago
Have you ever used it? It used to be a really nice way to consume content... instead of having to check every blog/webcomic/whatever individually, you could have a folder of RSS feeds in your browser and sweep over them to see at a glance if anything new had been posted. Or you could have a dedicated RSS reader that would do stuff for you such as archiving content for offline use, search indexing, etc. I am still deeply annoyed that RSS has fallen out of popular use.
rchaud 3y ago
If you have ever used a podcast app, you've used RSS. The exception being if your only podcast listening is through private apps like Spotify.
myaccountonhn 3y ago
I've recently converted to it and can't believe I didn't sooner. It's a very nice way to get news from different sources. I started to use it after getting off reddit, and now have it to receive the latest news from Hackernews, pl discourses, lemmy communities and more.