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I hate RSS. It’s a bad format that developed organically in all the worst ways, and it should have died completely in favour of Atom by about twenty years ago.

I hate RSS. It’s a bad format that developed organically in all the worst ways, and it should have died completely in favour of Atom by about twenty years ago. I started a draft describing some of the problems that actually matter (thing that can’t be represented reliably in RSS, and such) in <https://chrismorgan.info/atom%3Erss https://chrismorgan.info/atom%3Erss>. And so I wish people would stop calling feeds RSS, because it continues to compound the problem. Let RSS die! More than once I’ve seen people implement RSS feeds, at great pain and often with errors, simply because they hadn’t heard of Atom. (I still need to decide which spec I hate more, RSS or OpenGraph. Hmm… RSS had more excuses for being bad, OpenGraph was just a spectacularly bad thing thrown over the wall by a company that should have known better. I drafted something examining how comprehensively bad it was some years ago, I should put it onto my new site and continue it at some point.)

dewey 3mo ago
Having structured feeds of any kind is already a niche and much appreciated when it happens. How to call them correctly technically based on some specs is not the hill to die on. We call them RSS feeds, RSS reader apps even if it might be implemented as an Atom feed.
- F3nd0 3mo ago
  I have trouble seeing how that helps anyone. It’s not like ‘RSS’ is a widespread term the way ‘Word’ or even ‘Mastodon’ are (and even there I’d argue it’s worthwhile to use technically more correct terms). Why not just use ‘news feed’ as the general term? If you don’t care about the protocol in the first place, that’s far more descriptive and correct, no?
  - dewey 3mo ago
    Because if you say "News feed" people are thinking Facebook or Twitter feed. RSS is widely known as it was already integrated in browsers before as a "RSS" button if the site advertised that in the html head.
    - F3nd0 3mo ago
      I should think that’s a pretty niche memory among people who browse the internet nowadays, but then I only have anecdotal evidence, so I could be underestimating it. Even so, I think conflating a general type with a format specification is not a good idea overall.
  - ymolodtsov 3mo ago
    RSS is the only widespread enough name for this thing. Where you're correct is that it's silly to argue about the name of the format used by approximately three people. I'm not too serious here but even many news media publications are just dropping it, or separate into dozens of unconnected feeds.
    - jjordan 3mo ago
      If you think that's esoteric, there's also a JSON feed standard. I have found one thus far while building out an RSS directory of over 1,000 entries.
      - ymolodtsov 3mo ago
        What's esoteric is not the format specifically but whether people are knowingly using it. RSS lost when browsers dropped its native support. Would be interesting to see a world where Chrome/Safari still had clients for it.
- chrismorgan 3mo ago
  The reason I think it matters is that, because people keep on using the name of the wrong format, people keep on using that wrong format when they want to implement feeds. Where if they had known about Atom, or that podcast feeds are the only reason not to use Atom, they would gladly have used Atom.
  - sjs382 3mo ago
    Flashback to a memorable bug report complaining that "the JPEGs I'm uploading don't work" but upon further investigation, they were trying to upload HEIC photos. The field was explicit about the formats supported, but to this user, "JPEGs" just meant "images".
    - panzi 3mo ago
      Yeah, or people/websites calling short looping MPEG4 videos (even with audio) GIFs.
F3nd0 3mo ago
Thank you; that was a fun read! I had read that Atom was generally regarded as the technically superior format, but your article (and the links you helpfully provided therein) made it much more apparent why that is the case. :-)
Arshad-Talpur 3mo ago
I think they are alive just because they are rough and weired
8organicbits 3mo ago
I don't think this is helpful. The last statistic I saw put RSS at 77% of the web feed market share, higher than Atom. In the web feed market it isn't a protocol on the way out, its the dominant protocol. While RSS is tricky to parse in practice, many of the challenges are due to invalid feeds, which Atom is not invulnerable to. Its very likely that there is a well-tested feed parser for your favorite programming language, so most developers using feed programmatically don't need to handle those challenges themselves. For concerns like title encoding or summary vs full text description, you can handle those using namespaces. If you don't like any of the existing namespaces that do that you can create your own.
cadamsdotcom 3mo ago
"Where's the popular front?" "He's over there." https://youtube.com/watch?v=WboggjN_G-4 https://youtube.com/watch?v=WboggjN_G-4
moontear 3mo ago
I get your distaste, but RSS is the more famous wording of the technology. I would frame it as "people who love RSS - but technically these are Atom feeds". RSS is the word that stuck and I think we should keep promoting it and on a technical front I am with you - sure, let's use the Atom format "for RSS feeds".
panzi 3mo ago
Things that I noticed when I had a look at it: Atom supports multiple authors, RSS doesn't. Some say just separate them with commas, but readers don't understand that and it's all broken. Also Atom supports archive links for pagination to older entries. Some use the atom namespace inside of RSS to use archive links. No idea if there are feed readers that don't support Atom, but do support Atom tags inside of RSS.

dewey 3mo ago

Having structured feeds of any kind is already a niche and much appreciated when it happens. How to call them correctly technically based on some specs is not the hill to die on. We call them RSS feeds, RSS reader apps even if it might be implemented as an Atom feed.

F3nd0 3mo ago
I have trouble seeing how that helps anyone. It’s not like ‘RSS’ is a widespread term the way ‘Word’ or even ‘Mastodon’ are (and even there I’d argue it’s worthwhile to use technically more correct terms). Why not just use ‘news feed’ as the general term? If you don’t care about the protocol in the first place, that’s far more descriptive and correct, no?
- dewey 3mo ago
  Because if you say "News feed" people are thinking Facebook or Twitter feed. RSS is widely known as it was already integrated in browsers before as a "RSS" button if the site advertised that in the html head.
  - F3nd0 3mo ago
    I should think that’s a pretty niche memory among people who browse the internet nowadays, but then I only have anecdotal evidence, so I could be underestimating it. Even so, I think conflating a general type with a format specification is not a good idea overall.
- ymolodtsov 3mo ago
  RSS is the only widespread enough name for this thing. Where you're correct is that it's silly to argue about the name of the format used by approximately three people. I'm not too serious here but even many news media publications are just dropping it, or separate into dozens of unconnected feeds.
  - jjordan 3mo ago
    If you think that's esoteric, there's also a JSON feed standard. I have found one thus far while building out an RSS directory of over 1,000 entries.
    - ymolodtsov 3mo ago
      What's esoteric is not the format specifically but whether people are knowingly using it. RSS lost when browsers dropped its native support. Would be interesting to see a world where Chrome/Safari still had clients for it.
chrismorgan 3mo ago
The reason I think it matters is that, because people keep on using the name of the wrong format, people keep on using that wrong format when they want to implement feeds. Where if they had known about Atom, or that podcast feeds are the only reason not to use Atom, they would gladly have used Atom.
- sjs382 3mo ago
  Flashback to a memorable bug report complaining that "the JPEGs I'm uploading don't work" but upon further investigation, they were trying to upload HEIC photos. The field was explicit about the formats supported, but to this user, "JPEGs" just meant "images".
  - panzi 3mo ago
    Yeah, or people/websites calling short looping MPEG4 videos (even with audio) GIFs.

F3nd0 3mo ago

Thank you; that was a fun read! I had read that Atom was generally regarded as the technically superior format, but your article (and the links you helpfully provided therein) made it much more apparent why that is the case. :-)

Arshad-Talpur 3mo ago

I think they are alive just because they are rough and weired

8organicbits 3mo ago

I don't think this is helpful. The last statistic I saw put RSS at 77% of the web feed market share, higher than Atom. In the web feed market it isn't a protocol on the way out, its the dominant protocol. While RSS is tricky to parse in practice, many of the challenges are due to invalid feeds, which Atom is not invulnerable to. Its very likely that there is a well-tested feed parser for your favorite programming language, so most developers using feed programmatically don't need to handle those challenges themselves. For concerns like title encoding or summary vs full text description, you can handle those using namespaces. If you don't like any of the existing namespaces that do that you can create your own.

cadamsdotcom 3mo ago

"Where's the popular front?" "He's over there." https://youtube.com/watch?v=WboggjN_G-4 https://youtube.com/watch?v=WboggjN_G-4

moontear 3mo ago

I get your distaste, but RSS is the more famous wording of the technology. I would frame it as "people who love RSS - but technically these are Atom feeds". RSS is the word that stuck and I think we should keep promoting it and on a technical front I am with you - sure, let's use the Atom format "for RSS feeds".

panzi 3mo ago

Things that I noticed when I had a look at it: Atom supports multiple authors, RSS doesn't. Some say just separate them with commas, but readers don't understand that and it's all broken. Also Atom supports archive links for pagination to older entries. Some use the atom namespace inside of RSS to use archive links. No idea if there are feed readers that don't support Atom, but do support Atom tags inside of RSS.