What I mean by "the open web" | Hacker News Reader

What I mean by "the open web"

scripting.com

39 pointsdavewiner9 comments

I didn't follow the original discussion, but while I agree with the importance of the "open web" and the relative evilness of "corporate blogging silos", I don't quite understand how RSS and HTML are "really different faces of the same thing".

RSS is an open way of discovering new content; it is dead(-ish) because real people don't use it.

I'm aware that there are RSS readers; there even are RSS readers that actually work.

But RSS readers are not what the great majority of people use to discover new content; new content is discovered "socially" on YC or Reddit, etc.

I was stumped by the "really different faces of the same thing" claim as well in relation to HTML and RSS.

While RSS is not dead, and probably wont be for a long long time, I also think it needs to be viewed in perspective. "normal" people (not you and me) don't know what RSS is and for the most-part don't use it (or don't know that they are using it sometimes).

Dave has some good insights from time to time, but I get the impression that he is stretching his credits and claims far beyond reality.

You can only wave the "I co-invented RSS way back" flag for so long.

Where do you see me waving any flags? I think you should be equally protective of open formats and protocols. Stand up for them. That's all I'm doing donahoe.

If you want an HTML equivalent for RSS, there's hAtom: http://microformats.org/wiki/hatom

They are different sides of the same thing -- our websites. One is for looking at things in the browser, and the other is for mashups by software, the kind of stuff people in YCombinatorLand are supposed to savvy about.

What difference does it make how many people directly use RSS feeds. Systems are built around it that flow the news to people in every context. It's how news is distributed on the net.

You guys know all this, but you pretend you don't -- why?

To me the critical distinction hinges on required logins/APIs vs. open sites. (Redefining 'open' just be a bit provocative.) In any case, you could argue that loads of unsilo'd sites have been unfairly open to Google through their robots.txt.

What does "unfairly open to google" mean?

Something like

  User-agent: *
  Disallow: /
  
  User-agent: Googlebot
  Allow: /

This can be found on many /robots.txt files. I imagine that some of them will try to enforce this access policy. My point is that equal access for all has never existed. (Not that it would be realistic to expect it.)

So to be more precise you mean open to Google and closed to everyone else. I agree that sucks.

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