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Comment by philwelch | Hacker News Reader

> if put a podcast URL into my Webbrowser I just get a bunch of raw XML

And if I put a web URL into my telnet client I just get a bunch of raw HTTP! Not everything on the internet is part of the web. There have always been other protocols: IMAP/SMTP for email, IRC for chat, NNTP for newsgroups, XMPP for instant messaging, and RSS for subscriptions.

The idea that everything has to be done over the web is what’s really undermined “the idea of HTML as a markup language”. If HTML is a markup language, why would you use it for all these other use cases, most of which were handled with much better performance on hardware from twenty years ago?

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Not disagreeing entirely, but don't forget that you used to be able to type ftp://example.com and gopher://example.com into the url to access sites. I think there were others as well. Most browsers have removed those protocols.

As you point out, ftp and gopher were, at one point in time, also used to transfer websites, so the inclusion was supportive of the web directive.

But have browsers ever widely attempted to be anything other than web browsers? A couple of vendors tried including RSS support at one point, but I don't recall it catching on across the industry.

Media (images, audio, video) browsers, maybe. Technically that is not HTML, but still rendered by most browsers. However, as that content can also be embedded in HTML, requiring browser support to be present anyway, it is a bit grey area.

Late versions of Netscape and early versions of Mozilla included email clients. Mozilla later split the email client and web browser into two separate programs, Thunderbird and Firebird. Firebird became Firefox.

Didn’t they also include calendaring at some point?

Didn’t JZW once famously say all software grows until it eventually has an email client?

You're thinking of Mozilla Sunbird.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Sunbird

Netscape Communicator included a calendar at one point.

And Usenet! That never caught on either, though. We've had more web browsers with RSS support than web browsers with email support.

Opera was also a mail client and IRC client at one point.

> As you point out, ftp and gopher were, at one point in time, also used to transfer websites, so the inclusion was supportive of the web directive.

for blogging, RSS is a mechanism to transfer webpages. so shouldn't this apply?

Last time I looked at RSS the transfer was bound to happen over HTTP. RSS is more like a web alternative. You can link from RSS to web pages, sure, but you can also link to web pages from Word documents. Perhaps browsers should all natively support .docx too?

Although you ultimately raise a good point. Most browsers do support PDF. That's the wide attempt to be something other than a web browser that I was forgetting about earlier. So, there you go, there is precedence.

Although there is still that pesky problem of most people not wanting to use RSS. Apple had good in-browser support for RSS there for a while but they found nobody used it. If Apple can't convince Average Joe to use something, it isn't likely anyone can. RSS has remained relevant for podcasts only because it has found a place in server-to-server syndication. Average Joe isn't visiting Harmony Harold's personal website to subscribe to his podcast either.

The difference is that every computer comes with a app where you can copy-paste that URL and see the full website. With RSS, you first need to find and install a 3rd party software to view it and/or create an account on a website.

This was one feature I really liked about the old Opera. I seem to recall being able to look at an RSS feed and it applied a basic style to it from the get-go, as it had baked-in RSS support.

That’s mostly because tech companies have been trying to kill open protocols like RSS in order to lock people into their proprietary platforms.

That doesn't answer why Firefox doesn't have RSS support anymore though (removed in 2018)

I don’t think Firefox continuing to support RSS would have made a difference. It makes sense for Mozilla to prioritize features that users actually want over trying to maintain some idealistic vision that was already dead.

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