Most of the online content I consume comes to me either via RSS or Atom (I don't have numbers on the split). Not once have I thought - "Gosh darn it, this blog uses RSS instead of Atom, even though Atom is so obviously the better choice. Now I don't even want to add this blog to my feed." ...
I don't think this article is aimed at consumers, but at developers who might have to write parsers, or people who are trying to decide what feed format to use for their own content.
Though you might be upset about RSS being used when your reader screws up with it, because some things are difficult to interpret. Of course, you won't know why it screws up, and you'll probably blame the person who wrote the feed, not the format itself.
> Gabriel offers the examples of the adoption of C over Lisp, Unix over Lisp machines and VMS, and x86 over reduced instruction set computers as examples of technically worse solutions defeating more elegant ones by arriving to market first.
Even (especially?) as a person that appreciates Lisp, Lisp losing this fight twice is kind of funny.
Wonder if it’s going to happen an nth time with Guix vs Nix
I remember ( I may be very wrong ) eventually RSS and Atom became one and the same thing for consumer and that all RSS reader would parse Atom feed, RSS became the logo and the name people know, atom was used behind the scene.
Apart from iTunes, as the article said.
It has been 20+ years I do hope someone on HN can now spills the beans as to why.
- since we are on the topic i got a question for you
- what is the best way to store rss data inside postgres
- will you store it as raw xml directly? or will you process it and store it?
- what format will you store it as if stored inside postgres?
- how will you handle updates to the feed? rss doesnt do websocket push as far as i can tell so you have to poll which gives you the entire feed with a few items removed and a few new items added in the best case scenario. how do you diff this for storing?
Not relevant to the overall discussion, but this VHS vs Betamax thing is actually a myth, borne from confusing Betamax (a home consumer version, comparable and inferior to VHS) with Betacam (a professional format, which could use the same physical tapes as Betamax, albeit at much shorter runtimes so not suitable for movies).
What? Not at all. RSS is a product category. Many RSS feeds are, if you look into them, Atom. Your RSS reader just doesn't bother to tell you, because why would you care?
Try putting a Betamax tape into a VHS VCR and see if you can watch it.
This is like pointing at the monitor of a desktop computer and saying, "that's the computer". It is effective to communicate with people who aren't interested in computers, but it's also not true and the distinction does have important consequences for behavior. Atom is not RSS even if some feed readers support both and most people don't know what feeds are.
And because of that, and the early popularity and widespread adoption of RSS, the better format (atom) isn't used nearly as much. And calls to increase use of betamax/atom generally went and go unheeded.
> and the early popularity and widespread adoption of RSS, the better format (atom) isn't used nearly as much.
That may have been true 20 years ago, but now that pretty much no-one uses either of them , I'd be surprised if RSS was still meaningfully more widespread than Atom. (Except everything is being called RSS).
Most of the online content I consume comes to me either via RSS or Atom (I don't have numbers on the split). Not once have I thought - "Gosh darn it, this blog uses RSS instead of Atom, even though Atom is so obviously the better choice. Now I don't even want to add this blog to my feed." ...
I don't think this article is aimed at consumers, but at developers who might have to write parsers, or people who are trying to decide what feed format to use for their own content.
Though you might be upset about RSS being used when your reader screws up with it, because some things are difficult to interpret. Of course, you won't know why it screws up, and you'll probably blame the person who wrote the feed, not the format itself.
Didn't we get enough of this fight 20 years ago? Let's not piss off Dave Winer again. Reminder: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better
Isn't this just VHS v Betamax again?
Only the porn industry can answer that question.
> Gabriel offers the examples of the adoption of C over Lisp, Unix over Lisp machines and VMS, and x86 over reduced instruction set computers as examples of technically worse solutions defeating more elegant ones by arriving to market first.
Even (especially?) as a person that appreciates Lisp, Lisp losing this fight twice is kind of funny.
Wonder if it’s going to happen an nth time with Guix vs Nix
I remember ( I may be very wrong ) eventually RSS and Atom became one and the same thing for consumer and that all RSS reader would parse Atom feed, RSS became the logo and the name people know, atom was used behind the scene.
Apart from iTunes, as the article said.
It has been 20+ years I do hope someone on HN can now spills the beans as to why.
I think literally 90% of people that know RSS, if you ask them what Atom is, they will probably reply RSS.
I liked thought the article as I never deep dived in the differences
The three ways of encoding the string "<xmp>" in the title all look like awful gibberish to me.
- since we are on the topic i got a question for you
- what is the best way to store rss data inside postgres
- will you store it as raw xml directly? or will you process it and store it?
- what format will you store it as if stored inside postgres?
- how will you handle updates to the feed? rss doesnt do websocket push as far as i can tell so you have to poll which gives you the entire feed with a few items removed and a few new items added in the best case scenario. how do you diff this for storing?
The article is correct. Anyone who knows what they’re doing builds an Atom feed, not RSS. In fact, I thought this was common knowledge a decade ago.
Atom is better than RSS in the way Betamax was better than VHS. With the same outcome and consequences for practical use.
Not relevant to the overall discussion, but this VHS vs Betamax thing is actually a myth, borne from confusing Betamax (a home consumer version, comparable and inferior to VHS) with Betacam (a professional format, which could use the same physical tapes as Betamax, albeit at much shorter runtimes so not suitable for movies).
As in we now use neither?
What? Not at all. RSS is a product category. Many RSS feeds are, if you look into them, Atom. Your RSS reader just doesn't bother to tell you, because why would you care?
Try putting a Betamax tape into a VHS VCR and see if you can watch it.
Atom is a response to not wanting to support backwards compatibility like RSS does in order to improve things. https://web.archive.org/web/20080216234454/http://www.sixapa... It's explicitly a different thing.
This is like pointing at the monitor of a desktop computer and saying, "that's the computer". It is effective to communicate with people who aren't interested in computers, but it's also not true and the distinction does have important consequences for behavior. Atom is not RSS even if some feed readers support both and most people don't know what feeds are.
And because of that, and the early popularity and widespread adoption of RSS, the better format (atom) isn't used nearly as much. And calls to increase use of betamax/atom generally went and go unheeded.
> and the early popularity and widespread adoption of RSS, the better format (atom) isn't used nearly as much.
That may have been true 20 years ago, but now that pretty much no-one uses either of them , I'd be surprised if RSS was still meaningfully more widespread than Atom. (Except everything is being called RSS).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49141336 is the only valid response to your VHS/Betamax comparison, really.
I use RSS multiple times daily.
One person using something doesn't mean it's popular.
And you're also on HN, you're not exactly the average human being.
Do you use “RSS” as a protol specifically, or do you use “RSS” as in “any feed no matter the protocol”?