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At least for me, there is still benefit in being able to load only the list of articles. Attempting to fetch the full HTML and scrape it can be error prone and
by _heimdall 2y ago
At least for me, there is still benefit in being able to load only the list of articles. Attempting to fetch the full HTML and scrape it can be error prone and may not even work depending on how the site is using client-side rendering.
Microformsts, which give us things like h-feed, are useful but the author is already thinking about the feed reader use case. Why wouldn't they also hook up an RSS feed?
- bluebarbet 2y agoThe scraping issue is resolved by just putting the `h-feed` attributes on the relevant HTML elements. Far easier to implement and maintain than RSS. Maintaining a parallel XML endpoint is itself very error-prone, I know this from unpleasant experience. The only drawback to `h-feed` I can see is that the feed reader must fetch a larger initial payload. Seems like a small price to pay for much easier implementation and maintainability.
- _heimdall 2y agoDo RSS readers and libraries do a good job of parsing out the feed without all the related microformats tags like h-entry, p-title, etc? I've found microformats to be just as much work to maintain (assuming more than just h-feed is needed these days). Its still easy to break silently, and if I care enough to make it I'll automate a test. Testing an RSS feed shouldn't be any harder than testing the rendered HTML to catch silent regressions.