Comment by account42 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by account42 | Hacker News Reader

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> every day I deal with broken links and broken images because my feed reader doesn't know from which URL it should resolve relative links

I have never had this problem. Do you have any example feeds you encounter this with? Are you sure its not just a bug in your reader?

> there's no pagination mechanism, or way for a client to ask for "all posts since last Friday". If you want your feed to always have all posts available, you need to include the entirety of your archive in every feed response.

Agreed that this would be nice to have, but for its primary purpose - to syndicate new content - this does not matter in practice. Having RSS completely static means that hosting an RSS feed is super simple and does not require the increased attack potential of a dynamic service - something that the current federated web protocols completely fail at. It should of course be possible to host support retrieval of past posts with a static-hosting-compatible protocol, in theory at least.

> if I want to follow any link I get kicked back out to a bloated web page

If that page has a linked RSS feed and a permalink mathing the URL or embedded in the page metadata then in theory your reader could show you the corresponding RSS post. I don't think creating a separate RSS-only web of links makes sense.

> lots of posts include iframes

Lots? Really? iframes are more dead than RSS, at least for anything outside of ads.

> or content that only makes sense with JS enabled

Limiting RSS to static mostly-text content provides a lot of consistency. Most articles don't need JS. For those that do RSS can still link to a webpage just like podcasts don't embed the audio in the RSS feed. There is also nothing stopping an RSS reader from showing link-only posts as an embedded web view - personally I prefer a link that opens in a new browser tab though.

> XML

Ugly, yes, but how is this a problem in practice? Just because it's not as hip as JSON?

> I have never had this problem. Do you have any example feeds you encounter this with? Are you sure its not just a bug in your reader?

I mean, it's hard to say whether it's a bug in my reader, given that the RSS spec makes no mention of how relative links should work. I've variously used Newsbeuter, Newsboat, Newsblur, and The Old Reader and have never not had this problem.

(Edit: an example from this morning: Newsblur didn't know what to do with the footnote links in Dan Luu's blog [https://danluu.com/atom.xml]. Aside: Newsblur seems to be responding with 500s for about every other request today. sigh isn't technology wonderful?)

> Having RSS completely static means that hosting an RSS feed is super simple and does not require the increased attack potential of a dynamic service - something that the current federated web protocols completely fail at.

Pagination would work fine with static hosting. And "updates-since" requests wouldn't preclude static hosts from ignoring them and working exactly how they work now.

I agree with you about federated web protocols though - I'm pretty bummed ActivityPub requires an inbox, otherwise I think it would pretty much work with static hosting.

> I don't think creating a separate RSS-only web of links makes sense.

You're right, it doesn't really make sense. I think the crux of my frustration there is that we've got a syndication system that's bolted on top of the web, rather than properly integrated. It's probably the best that can be done though, without an entire separate hypertext system.

> Lots? Really? iframes are more dead than RSS, at least for anything outside of ads.

Youtube and Vimeo embeds are mostly where I see them.

>> or content that only makes sense with JS enabled

> Limiting RSS to static mostly-text content provides a lot of consistency.

I'm not complaining that feed items can't execute Javascript; I'm annoyed that sometimes the (textual) content of the post refers directly to other content that's only there after JS adds it. (I'm not blaming authors, this is just a problem of the content being written for a webpage and then being included in a different context. Again, an issue of the syndication system having been bolted onto the web.)

> Ugly, yes, but how is this a problem in practice? Just because it's not as hip as JSON?

No, I don't particularly love JSON either. XML does indeed work okay, but I pretty regularly (a couple times a year, maybe?) see broken feeds because of mis-escaped content. I think one of the feed generators of someone I follow produces bad CDATA tags too. Pretty hard to mess up JSON escaping (as much as HTML-in-JSON makes me shudder).

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