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OK I won't dispute that. The problem is that they would function nicely as a pragmatic solution to the underlying problem. Maintaining a few HTML attributes on

OK I won't dispute that. The problem is that they would function nicely as a pragmatic solution to the underlying problem. Maintaining a few HTML attributes on an existing webpage is significantly easier than maintaining an RSS XML endpoint.

rglullis 2y ago
RSS 1.0 was created in 2000. We are talking about a time where the browser that dominated the market was Internet Explorer 5, where virtually no website would render on strict standards mode, and MS refused to introduce any significant changes if it meant breaking its compatibility mode. People realized that that asking the whole web to adopt XHTML fully would never happen, so a new XML-based format hat was separate from the webpages was needed. (Also, a bit of a side rant: now that I am working on ActivityPub stuff I'm finding less and less sympathy for those that jump into code and push for "pragmatic" solutions. The ActivityPub spec is not perfect, but it's incredible how almost everyone implementing ActivityPub ignores JSON-LD and RDF and just want to wing with the JSON messages. It gets to the point where perfectly valid JSON-LD will get refused to anything that is not called Mastodon, because everyone else is just parsing the JSON they receive and completely ignoring @context directives)
- bluebarbet 2y ago
  Yep I know the history, I was building sites at the time. And my own unfashionable take is that "pragmatic" HTML5 was a cop-out, it was still early days for the web and XHTML would have been worth the initial breakages. Interesting rant about ActivityPub, you have my sympathy.
- account42 2y ago
  > Also, a bit of a side rant: now that I am working on ActivityPub stuff I'm finding less and less sympathy for those that jump into code and push for "pragmatic" solutions. The ActivityPub spec is not perfect, but it's incredible how almost everyone implementing ActivityPub ignores JSON-LD and RDF and just want to wing with the JSON messages. It gets to the point where perfectly valid JSON-LD will get refused to anything that is not called Mastodon, because everyone else is just parsing the JSON they receive and completely ignoring @context directives Maybe making everyone who wants to interact with the fediverse deal with all that complexity isn't such a great idea after all. What we really should have gotten was RSS++ with optional push notifications for new content instead of this mess. But it wouldn't be the web without reinventing the wheel for every new "standard" I guess.
  - rglullis 2y ago
    But this wouldn't give you two-way interactivity, and RSS and ATOM are just different ways to go about representing RDF. I could entertain the argument that we don't need two way interactivity, and that most of the applications would be fine by implementing their own ad-hoc API. This is exactly what is happening in the Fediverse now, where every microblogging project ends up implementing Mastodon's API and every Lemmy client goes straight up to Lemmy's API instead of getting the data from "raw" ActivityPub.

rglullis 2y ago

RSS 1.0 was created in 2000. We are talking about a time where the browser that dominated the market was Internet Explorer 5, where virtually no website would render on strict standards mode, and MS refused to introduce any significant changes if it meant breaking its compatibility mode. People realized that that asking the whole web to adopt XHTML fully would never happen, so a new XML-based format hat was separate from the webpages was needed. (Also, a bit of a side rant: now that I am working on ActivityPub stuff I'm finding less and less sympathy for those that jump into code and push for "pragmatic" solutions. The ActivityPub spec is not perfect, but it's incredible how almost everyone implementing ActivityPub ignores JSON-LD and RDF and just want to wing with the JSON messages. It gets to the point where perfectly valid JSON-LD will get refused to anything that is not called Mastodon, because everyone else is just parsing the JSON they receive and completely ignoring @context directives)

bluebarbet 2y ago
Yep I know the history, I was building sites at the time. And my own unfashionable take is that "pragmatic" HTML5 was a cop-out, it was still early days for the web and XHTML would have been worth the initial breakages. Interesting rant about ActivityPub, you have my sympathy.
account42 2y ago
> Also, a bit of a side rant: now that I am working on ActivityPub stuff I'm finding less and less sympathy for those that jump into code and push for "pragmatic" solutions. The ActivityPub spec is not perfect, but it's incredible how almost everyone implementing ActivityPub ignores JSON-LD and RDF and just want to wing with the JSON messages. It gets to the point where perfectly valid JSON-LD will get refused to anything that is not called Mastodon, because everyone else is just parsing the JSON they receive and completely ignoring @context directives Maybe making everyone who wants to interact with the fediverse deal with all that complexity isn't such a great idea after all. What we really should have gotten was RSS++ with optional push notifications for new content instead of this mess. But it wouldn't be the web without reinventing the wheel for every new "standard" I guess.
- rglullis 2y ago
  But this wouldn't give you two-way interactivity, and RSS and ATOM are just different ways to go about representing RDF. I could entertain the argument that we don't need two way interactivity, and that most of the applications would be fine by implementing their own ad-hoc API. This is exactly what is happening in the Fediverse now, where every microblogging project ends up implementing Mastodon's API and every Lemmy client goes straight up to Lemmy's API instead of getting the data from "raw" ActivityPub.