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Comment by ravenstine | Hacker News Reader

RSS is difficult to implement? Since when?

Sure, it's XML. And had I been the one to design it from the start, I would have gone with JSON. But come on.

RSS has been losing ground because, deep down, people love the algorithms. I personally hate how algorithms artificially mangle content that I would have seen anyway if my "timeline" was chronological; it's annoying to me to have stories from hours or days prior to appear near the top of my feed because everyone has already seen the same thing by now and new comments are worthless/unseen after a givens tory is ~1.5 hours old.

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Its XML which requires a more difficult tree abstraction instead of a mapping/list abstraction

and the XML wraps html-formatted articles, so unless you hate yourself, you'll need to be embedding a browser for rendering, which means bundling a browser too (even on certain browser embed providing platforms like win32, since it still uses IE11 as its browser embed)

of course its easy to generate RSS.

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and thats nevermind the whole impossibility of getting all articles without a daemon on a separate server, especially for high-volume feeds

Its XML which requires a more difficult tree abstraction instead of a mapping/list abstraction

of course its easy to generate RSS

> RSS is difficult to implement? Since when?

He didn't say that - just that people find JSON exciting. There are many things that have been rewritten in JSON just to become popular again, or things people have done long before but are exciting because they're now JSON.

I would love to believe that idea would work.

What are some examples of concepts written for JSON that became more successful than their predecessor?

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