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Comment by lloydatkinson | Hacker News Reader

I think RSS needs fixing first before building anything on top of it. At the risk of that xkcd meme about 15 competing standards, RSS + images is a total mess. Every reader supports different ways of rendering images. Sometimes it's inline HTML, sometimes it's the RSS <enclosure> element, sometimes its something entirely else.

Some readers either support <enclosure> or instead load inexplicably tiny/blown up/stretched/pixelated images, or just don't display any images at all.

Consider that podcasts use RSS - yet need a special namespace "itunes" in order to work:

<itunes:duration>30:00</itunes:duration>

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This is one reason why it's important to not try to do too much over RSS. The question isn't "can we re-implement every social media feature using RSS," it's "what is the minimum amount of interop we need in order to for an ecosystem without gatekeepers to flourish," which hopefully will make things bearable.

Besides that, I also think this problem can be ameliorated to some extent by using and developing open-source feed parsing libs like Python's feedparser rather than using a plain XML parser and doing the rest yourself.

[1] https://feedparser.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

Having had to work with importing RSS feeds. I absolutely despise the tech. The sources generating RSS have almost no consistency on how things are done and the actual spec itself doesn't show much opinion on which of the 5 ways to do things is the preferred one. That's before you get in to the mess of invalid RSS and then invalid XML which is extremely common.

One of the problems is the spec tries to do everything. You have blogs, podcasts, random crap, and now social media all trying to cram in to the same spec. Ideally you want one spec per use case. With modern tech it's very easy to create a new JSON spec which is trivial to parse and serialize. And you can auto generate extremely accurate documentation.

I don't think we really need "another rss" which would just be fragmentation. We just do not need to be using RSS for social media just because you can.

Yes, RSS is terrible, use Atom. They do the same job, most tools support both, and one of them was thoughtfully designed.

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