Hacker News Reader

Comment by houzi | Hacker News Reader

You're consuming the content in a browser, when it's supposed to be consumed by an RSS reader.

I'm all for this, but a problem is that it doesn't play at all well with text based browsers either.

Without wrapping it's just a collection of very long lines that won't display nicely in something like w3m.

Maybe calling a "web* site is a mistake. Why not proudly announce it as an RSS site and mark the feed protocol accordingly?

Which makes your content unlinkable in a way, since there is no way to link to a news item in an RSS Reader. So you can only ever send links to the version you're not supposed to read. :-)

The lack of URLs also means it's impractical for a reader of your feed to ever share your content. There's no real mechanism to link to any particular item in an RSS feed. There's also no guarantee any particular item in a feed will persist any length of time.

So if someone's feed extols the virtues of RSS feeds the only option for sharing that is to share the whole feed. If someone checks the feed a month later that great point made may no longer be in the feed. Since it doesn't exist as a post on a website it's just lost. No no one will ever be convinced RSS is the end-all be-all of blogging.

Just seems like a RSS fetish.

I don’t want to come across as an apologist for the author, but I can imagine him replying that this is an intentional trade off, and that for a larger-scale conversation about the work, the mailing list is a better option.

I’ll concede that at that point, a mailing list may be preferable to the RSS feed in the first place. Or Usenet.

I just tried to fetch TDARB.ORG's RSS-feed[0] with RSS Guard[1] app (via development "nowebengine" AppImage build), but for curious reasons it shown empty (even XML-file include some posts data).

UPD: It's working now, after switching RSS-feed "Type" to "RSS 2.0/2.1" (by default RSS Guard set "ATOM 1.0")

[0] https://tdarb.org/feeds/posts.xml

[1] https://github.com/martinrotter/rssguard/releases/tag/devbui...

That doesn't change the validity of their point. One could respond: "why are you generating html content when it's supposed to be consumed by an RSS reader?".

It's not HTML content.

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