2018-12-01 Thinking about the real RSS 3.0

I’m still sad about RSS 2.0 and Atom. Why didn’t we go the other way? Aaron Swartz had the right ideas and called it RSS 3.0! He was so ahead of his time.

=> Aaron Swartz had the right ideas | RSS 3.0

Follow those links and read it. The introduction in particular is still gold! 😂

Quote:

1. Remove XML. XML is just too complicated and is against the spirit of RSS, which is Really Simple Syndication. [...] Instead, we’ll go back to RFC822-style fields. [...]

2. Remove namespaces. Namespaces are just a waste of time. [...]

3. HTML forbidden. No one needs HTML. Email has been just fine for years before Microsoft introduce their stupid rich HTML extensions. HTML is for those loser newbies. Any intelligent Internet user deals in plain text.

Clearly, it’s a joke. But the reason it burns is because it is so attractive.

And to be sure, it is a joke! Aaron Swartz was a member of the RSS-DEV Working Group which had developed RSS 1.0. He didn’t actually espouse the values expressed in the list above. But they still speak to me in an irrational way, like Gopher speaks to me.

=> RSS-DEV Working Group

Wouldn’t this make sense, in a retro kind of way? When some people start seeing a point in Gopher in an age of HTML 5 and rich multi-media hypertext, then perhaps we can also go “back” to a syndication format that never was. I don’t actually prefer Gopher to the Web. I prefer the spirit of Gopher. I like being able to write a client and a server in a few lines of code. I like the absence of Javascript and Cookies. I like the lack of surveillance. That’s because Gopher is simple. I want things to be simple. And I want feed parsing to be simple. Sure, there are libraries to help parse XML (like there are for HTTP, HTML, caching, headers, content negotiation, Javascript, and so on). But nothing beats a few lines of code.

sub ParseData {
  my $data = shift;
  my %result;
  while ($data =~ /(\S+?): (.*?)(?=\n[^ \t]|\Z)/gs) {
    my ($key, $value) = ($1, $2);
    $value =~ s/\n\t/\n/g;
    $result{$key} = $value;
  }
  return wantarray ? %result : \%result; # return list sometimes for compatibility
}

Oddmuse uses this format to save data to disk. 🙃

Anyway, if you want to go for a deep dive, there is a lot more history and examples in the long, multi-page article The Evolution of RSS. The history section on Wikipedia is much shorter.

=> The Evolution of RSS | history section on Wikipedia

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