7 Poor Features Of RSS

January 25, 2004 in Uncategorized | 2 comments

Dylan Greene is discussing the 7 must-have features of RSS. I disagree with most.

  1. Authentication – RSS uses http authentication, if you want it. If you don’t need it (as in most cases), it is bloat.
  2. Query Standard – Outside of the scope of a simple syndication standard, and certainly not a “must have” for mainstram use.
  3. Content Standards – I agree on this.
  4. The Name – The name is fine. Call it the more generic “syndication” is you must.
  5. Ad Standard – Hardly a must have and a bit of a pipe dream. Ads will never be standardised, because that makes them easy to filter.
  6. DRM and encryption – Avoid proprietary cludges? Not going to happen. The corporations will put in whatever they like, regardless.
  7. Attachment Standard – It already exists but is never used.

I doubt very much whether the average web browser cares about any of those things, or what effect they will have.

  1. Deraj’s avatar

    Deraj on January 26, 2004 at 2:33 am

    I read his article and his ideas seem pretty crazy to me (bordering on contrary to the principles of the Web and the established RSS/blog culture).

    I’m not even sure that #3 is realistic. It would seem to me that putting an entire HTML page into an RSS feed would be a waste (instead of downloading one page, you download the entire news archive… every day!?). The other options seem like they’re practically the same thing just with more or less text (and authors seem to be pretty spread out on this issue).

    Perhaps links within all the feeds to the other feeds would help the user to find the type of feed they want when a site supports multiple feed types. But this seems like a waste of bandwidth to me (the RSS file that is downloaded constantly should be as small as reasonably possible in my opinion).

  2. Gary Fleming’s avatar

    Gary Fleming on January 26, 2004 at 9:07 am

    I’m not sure that he means downloading the full archive every day, but even a full permalink page is a bit much. Syndicating the text is what RSS is really about.

    Also, the choice of what to send (text, html etc) should be up to the producer, not the consumer.

    Atom does go a long way to cleaning most of this stuff up.