4 ms·

Poe'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 "Sma

Poe'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 ago
I 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 ago
I 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 ago
  I 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
    Mozilla had half a billion dollars each year to work with, I am sure they could have figured something out if they cared. But hey, instead of fixing some HTML tags lets reinvent a completely new format and require every singe website on the planet to adopt that, that'll sure work out well...
    - rglullis 2y ago
      > But hey, instead of fixing some HTML tags lets reinvent a completely new format and require every singe website on the planet to adopt that, that'll sure work out well... It worked amazingly well! It worked so well that it became a problem for the publishers when they realized the standard for syndication has become so widely adopted that people were not visiting the websites anymore and they had lost control of content gatekeeping. > Mozilla had half a billion dollars each year to work with, I am sure they could have figured something out if they cared. I agree with you that Mozilla has shown that they don't really care about an open web, but I think you are reversing cause and effect. RSS was already a reality when Google had to kill (*) it, and Mozilla went along with it because they never managed to get out of Google's money tit. * Not really kill it, but just taking all the steam out of it so it wouldn't destroy their own business.
    - cgriswald 2y ago
      A publisher does not want countless browsers scraping arbitrary web pages just to see if they’ve changed when they can instead offer a single lightweight end point specifically for content that is intended to be updated. If browsers started doing this scraping I can only imagine the arms race. I can only see this happening as a service. A company crawls the web—probably a search company. Their LLM classifies changes. Their users can subscribe to individual sites or pages. Even then there are downsides to publishers including loss of some tracking information and users spending less time on their sites being subjected to advertisements.
      - bluebarbet 2y ago
        This was part of the technical justification for RSS: concentrate all the redundant page hits in once place. But another reason was that parsing an article list from messy tables-based HTML was harder than it is today with HTML5. There's even a feed attribute `h-feed` available today, which effectively turns list pages into feeds. Nobody uses it. The problem with the "single lightweight endpoint" is that it has to be maintained. RSS is literally a whole shadow site, with finicky XML validation to worry about on top. I've worked on multiple projects where the RSS endpoint was broken much of the time. It's both fragile and not very visible. A solution involving client parsing of semantic markup at least has the benefit of requiring zero maintenance.

frouge 2y ago

I 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 ago

I 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 ago
I 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
  Mozilla had half a billion dollars each year to work with, I am sure they could have figured something out if they cared. But hey, instead of fixing some HTML tags lets reinvent a completely new format and require every singe website on the planet to adopt that, that'll sure work out well...
  - rglullis 2y ago
    > But hey, instead of fixing some HTML tags lets reinvent a completely new format and require every singe website on the planet to adopt that, that'll sure work out well... It worked amazingly well! It worked so well that it became a problem for the publishers when they realized the standard for syndication has become so widely adopted that people were not visiting the websites anymore and they had lost control of content gatekeeping. > Mozilla had half a billion dollars each year to work with, I am sure they could have figured something out if they cared. I agree with you that Mozilla has shown that they don't really care about an open web, but I think you are reversing cause and effect. RSS was already a reality when Google had to kill (*) it, and Mozilla went along with it because they never managed to get out of Google's money tit. * Not really kill it, but just taking all the steam out of it so it wouldn't destroy their own business.
  - cgriswald 2y ago
    A publisher does not want countless browsers scraping arbitrary web pages just to see if they’ve changed when they can instead offer a single lightweight end point specifically for content that is intended to be updated. If browsers started doing this scraping I can only imagine the arms race. I can only see this happening as a service. A company crawls the web—probably a search company. Their LLM classifies changes. Their users can subscribe to individual sites or pages. Even then there are downsides to publishers including loss of some tracking information and users spending less time on their sites being subjected to advertisements.
    - bluebarbet 2y ago
      This was part of the technical justification for RSS: concentrate all the redundant page hits in once place. But another reason was that parsing an article list from messy tables-based HTML was harder than it is today with HTML5. There's even a feed attribute `h-feed` available today, which effectively turns list pages into feeds. Nobody uses it. The problem with the "single lightweight endpoint" is that it has to be maintained. RSS is literally a whole shadow site, with finicky XML validation to worry about on top. I've worked on multiple projects where the RSS endpoint was broken much of the time. It's both fragile and not very visible. A solution involving client parsing of semantic markup at least has the benefit of requiring zero maintenance.