Comment by grumbel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by grumbel | Hacker News Reader

To me the biggest problem of the Web is that there still isn't a standardized way to publish on it. Just uploading files to your server isn't enough when your audience has no easy means to find out that it happened.

That's why all the big centralized sites have a huge advantage over the Web. Youtube, Twitter and Co. will send notifications when there is new stuff. My browser won't do the same for the Web. Recommendations are another thing missing on the Web. There is no way to get related websites without the author of the current one putting links on it.

RSS had a bunch of good ideas, but it never had good browser support by default and the need for the website author to create it, limited it's usefulness. I am also not a fan of RSS being basically a copy of the website, not the website itself. Shouldn't good HTML markup be enough to retrieve the information automatically?

Either way, I think we really need to reinvent publishing, bookmarking, searching and cataloging of the Web. Just going back to late 90s style of Web design isn't going to work when SoC optimized sites still bubble to the top and push everything else out of the way.

> RSS had a bunch of good ideas, but it never had good browser support by default and the need for the website author to create it, limited it's usefulness.

I discovered RSS late, I knew what it was but I never paid attention to it. Now it is my primary source for aggregation. It works well and is very alive. Big sites often provide multiple categorized feeds, RSS readers are simple and highly customizable in terms of curation.

Curation and organization/bookmarking are the killer features here, not necessarily reading itself. I often visit sites directly from my RSS reader and I don't typically care whether I'm only getting headlines and descriptions/leads rather than the full content from a feed.

The only bummer is that it isn't adopted by the masses. I think browsers should be blamed here. It should be a default, easy to use feature of every major browser IMO. I just don't see a good counter argument. There are a ton of unexplored use-cases for it too.

> I am also not a fan of RSS being basically a copy of the website, not the website itself. Shouldn't good HTML markup be enough to retrieve the information automatically?

I don't necessarily agree, but an alternative is promoted by the Indieweb community. They are marking up their HTML in a way so you can extract a feed directly from itself, I think it is called h-feed or similar. Most of the arguments I personally disagree with, especially thinking of HTML files as the source of truth, because in my worldview this complects data projection with normalized data representation (which HTML is terrible at). But all of their arguments have a compelling rationale that are interesting to think about and you might agree with.

Web browsers could've kept the web a much better place if they had placed prominence on their RSS integration instead of saying "that's a niche case for third parties to handle better"

> Shouldn't good HTML markup be enough to retrieve the information automatically?

Microformats?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microformat

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