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Comment by James_K | Hacker News Reader

No because then it would not be an Atom feed. Atom is a syndication format, the successor to RSS. I must provide users with a link to a valid Atom XML document, and I want them to see a web page when this link is clicked.

This is why so many people find this objectionable. If you want to have a basic blog, you need some HTML docments and and RSS/Atom feed. The technologies required to do this are HTML for the documents and XSLT to format the feed. Google is now removing one of those technologies, which makes it essentially impossible to serve a truly static website.

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> Google is now removing one of those technologies, which makes it essentially impossible to serve a truly static website.

How so? You're just generating static pages. Generate ones that work.

You cannot generate a valid RRS/Atom document which also renders as HTML.

So put them on separate pages because they are separate protocols (HTML for the browser and XML for a feed reader), with a link on the HTML page to be copied and pasted into a feed reader.

It really feels like the developer has over-constrained the problem to work with browsers as they are right now in this context.

> So put them on separate pages because they are separate protocols

Would you also suggest I use separate URLs for HTTP/2 and HTTP/1.1? Maybe for a gzipped response vs a raw response?

It's the same content, just supplied in a different format. It should be the same URL.

There are separate URLs for "https:" vs "http:" although they are usually the same content when both are available (although I have seen some where it isn't the same), although the compression (and some other stuff) is decided by headers. However, it might make sense to include some of these things optionally within the URL (within the authority section and/or scheme section somehow), for compression, version of the internet, version of the protocol, certificate pinning, etc, in a way that these things are easily delimited so that a program that understands this convention can ignore them. However, that might make a mess.

I had also defined a "hashed:" scheme for specifying the hash of the file that is referenced by the URL, and this is a scheme that includes another URL. (The "jar:" scheme is another one that also includes other URL, and is used for referencing files within a ZIP archive.)

> Would you also suggest I use separate URLs for HTTP/2 and HTTP/1.1? Maybe for a gzipped response vs a raw response?

The difference between HTTP/2 and HTTP/1.1 is exactly like the difference between plugging your PC in with a green cable or a red cable. The client neither knows nor cares.

> It's the same content, just supplied in a different format. It should be the same URL.

So what do I put as the URL of an MP3 and an Ogg of the same song? It's the same content, just supplied in a different format.

> The difference between HTTP/2 and HTTP/1.1 is exactly like the difference between plugging your PC in with a green cable or a red cable. The client neither knows nor cares.

Just like protocol negotiation, HTTP has format negotiation and XML postprocessing for exactly the same reason.

> So what do I put as the URL of an MP3 and an Ogg of the same song? It's the same content, just supplied in a different format

Whatever you want? If I access example.org/example.png, most websites will return a webp or avif instead if my browser supports it.

Similarly, it makes sense to return an XML with XSLT for most browsers and a degraded experience with just a simple text file for legacy browsers such as NCSA Mosaic or 2027's Google Chrome.

> Whatever you want? If I access example.org/example.png, most websites will return a webp or avif instead if my browser supports it.

So, you need a lot of cleverness on the browser to detect which format the client needs, and return the correct thing?

Kind of not the same situation as emitting an XML file and a chunk of XSLT with it, really.

If you're going to make the server clever, why not just make the server clever enough to return either an RSS feed or an HTML page depending on what it guesses the client wants?

> If you're going to make the server clever, why not just make the server clever enough to return either an RSS feed or an HTML page depending on what it guesses the client wants?

There's no cleverness involved, this is an inherent part of the HTTP protocol. But Chrome still advertises full support for XHTML and XML:

    Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8

But importantly, for audio/video files, that's still just serving static files, which is very different from having to dynamically generate different files.

Then the server should supply the right format based on the `Accept` header, be it `application/rss+xml` or `application/atom+xml` or `text/xml` or `text/html`.

Even cheaper than shipping the client an XML and an XSLT is just shipping them the HTML the XSLT would output in the first place.

That's not exactly cheap on an arduino uno 3 with 2kb ram.

But regardless, someone suggested just including a script tag with xmlns of xhtml as alternative, which should work well enough (though not ideal).

How many people out of the world's nearly eight billion population, would you estimate, are attempting to host their blog including HTML posts and RSS feeds on an Arduino?

A lot of IoT devices use this strategy, actually. A lot. Significantly more than are using e.g. WebUSB.

Nonetheless, by that same argument you could just kill HN off. A lot of projects have a benefit that far outweighs their raw usage numbers.

I guess that tracks for Internet of Shitty Insecure Badly-Designed Things.

Come up with the worst possible way to present information over a web page.

What device with 2kB of RAM is going to generate any kind of useful RSS feed? Why would you not use something more capable, which is not only going to have more memory but also a lower power consumption?

> What device with 2kB of RAM is going to generate any kind of useful RSS feed?

Such devices usually don't generate RSS feeds, but e.g. sensor measurements as XML (which can be processed directly, or opened in a browser with XSLT to generate a website and an SVG chart from it)

> Why would you not use something more capable, which is not only going to have more memory but also a lower power consumption?

Because anything else will have >100× more power consumption?

Compare the power consumption of the atmega328p on an Arduino Uno 3 mentioned further up this thread, with the power consumption of literally any ARM chip smaller than the sort of thing you'd use in a laptop.

So in other words, no more static sites?

A static site can inspect headers. Static sites still have a web server.

A static site cannot inspect headers. There is no HTML, or even JavaScript function you can put in a file to inspect the headers before the file is sent to the client.

A static site is a collection of static files. It doesn't need a server, you could just open it locally (in browsers that don't block file:// URI schemes). If you need some special configuration of the server, it is no longer a static site. The server is dynamically selecting which content is served.

Oh, difference in definitions. You mean "non-configurable web server." Because you could definitely use a static site generator to create multiple versions of the site data and then configure your web server to select which data is emitted.

But agreed; if your web server is just reflecting the filesystem, add this to the pile of "things that are hard with that kind of web server." But perhaps worth noting: even Apache and Python's http.server can select the file to emit based on the Accept header.

A static site is one that you can serve through static hosting, where you have no control over the web server or its configuration. There is not some extra thing which is a static site with dynamic content. “Static” means “doesn't change.” The document served doesn't change subject to the person receiving it. You are talking about a solution that is dynamic. That does change based on who is making the request.

>you could definitely use a static site generator to create multiple versions of the site data and then configure your web server to select which data is emitted

And this web-server configuration would not exist within the static site. The static site generator could not output it, therefore it is not a part of the static site. It is not contained within the files output by the static site generator. It is additional dynamic content added by the web server.

It breaks the fundamental aspect of a static site, that it can be deployed simply to any service without change to the content. Just upload a zip file, and you are done.

Like I said, difference in definitions. https://www.google.com/search?q=static+site+serving+with+apa...

I get your meaning; I've just heard "static site" used to refer to a site where the content isn't dynamically computed at runtime, not a site where the server is doing a near-direct-mapping from the filesystem to the HTTP output.

> Just upload a zip file, and you are done.

This is actually how I serve my static sites via Dreamhost. The zipfile includes the content negotiation rules in the `.htaccess` file.

(Perhaps worth remembering: even the rule "the HTTP responses are generated by looking up a file matching the path in the URL and echoing that file as the body of the GET response" is still a per-server rule; there's no aspect of the HTTP spec that declares "The filesystem is directly mirrored to web access" is a thing. It's rather a protocol used by many simple web servers, and most of them allow overrides to do something slightly more complicated while being one step away from "this is just the identity function on whatever is in your filesystem, well, not technically the identity function because unless someone did something very naughty, I don't serve anything for http://example.com/../uhoh-now-i-am-in-your-user-directory").

>I must provide users with a link to a valid Atom XML document, and I want them to see a web page when this link is clicked.

Do RSS readers and browsers send the same Accept header?

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