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If RSS could solve the problem it would have done so a decade ago. The core issue is that browsers have completely failed at offering anything to keep track of
by grumbel 2y ago
If RSS could solve the problem it would have done so a decade ago.
The core issue is that browsers have completely failed at offering anything to keep track of websites. Why aren't notifications simply build into the bookmark system? I don't need the website to provide that information via yet another special format, my browser should be able to figure that out itself from plain .html. But bookmarks haven't changed one bit in about 30 years, instead we moved that functionality server-side for no reason.
- devmor 2y agoGod wouldn't that be simple and novel? Check a box when you bookmark a website and your browser polls it every so often for updates and gives you a little badge like a mobile app icon. No need for JS workers or push servers.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- oneeyedpigeon 2y agoI wouldn't mind if browsers want to offer that feature in addition to RSS. But I also don't want to be forced to use my browser's bookmarking feature - RSS helps to decouple that.
- rglullis 2y agoPoe's Law, or you really don't remember the time where browsers had a huge button in the address bar to announce their feeds or that Firefox used to have a "Smart Bookmarks" feature to show you all the latest updates from all the feeds you subscribed to?
- frouge 2y agoI agree that to succeed RSS must be properly managed right in the browser. The problem is that it was not properly implemented inside Firefox, so I personaly didn't want to use that system. What I want is a simple counter that show how many new posts there are of the RSS, and that's it. I only click for new content.
- grumbel 2y agoI am not talking about RSS, I am talking about plain old bookmarks. Browser never would give you notification when something you bookmarked changed. The RSS feature was always kind of useless, since it required that the website provided a RSS feed to begin with, which most don't. The implementation in Firefox was also horrible on top. HTML is a markup language, with header, datetime and article tags, parse that and do something useful with it, we don't need yet another format that duplicates the information that is already on the website.
- rglullis 2y agoI guess you are vastly underestimating the complexity of parsing HTML and extracting the relevant information out of it. It might seem trivial nowadays, but it falls well within https://xkcd.com/1425/ https://xkcd.com/1425/ territory if you take into account that the majority of web pages are basically producing non-spec conforming (X)HTML. And if you respond with "well, I don't care about the actual content, I just want to receive a notification when the page has changed at all", think how long would it take for every marketer use that "feature" to simply make minimal changes in the site to trick their viewers into inflating their page view numbers...
- grumbel 2y ago
- 6510 2y agoSwitching to the phone home screen was like we skipped a few dozen iterations. Or wait, that was just a clone from the pc desktop which was a clone from the 1973 Xerox Alto. https://design.tutsplus.com/articles/know-your-icons-part-1-a-brief-history-of-computer-icons--psd-9805 https://design.tutsplus.com/articles/know-your-icons-part-1-... Ah yes, how familiar it looks... My joke since the 90's: Mosaic had full text history search!! It aged well I must say. With all the money coming in from google it was hard for Mozilla to understand the point of subscribing to RSS or organizing what one finds online. For google it must have been even more incomprehensible.