Really Stupid Syndication

You know what? All syndication formats are dumb. I don’t mean mistaken; I mean stupendously braindead.

I just read the RSS 2.0 specification and The Atom Syndication Format 0.3 pre-draft. And I wonder, what the fuck happened to XHTML—is it too unsexy? Why put all the metadata about content items in a temporary update-describing file instead of the document that holds all the semantic markup?

(The Atom 0.3 pre-draft is a utf-8 document specified in a meta declaration as iso-8859-1. These are the guys who’re going to save us all from encoding problems?)

Update: Ok, the only problems I can think of with using HTML pages, with RDF inside them for summarization, publication date and other metadata, are:

The pages have to be well-structured: an ‘item’ of content should be easily demarcated in the webpage rather than processed for the feed and webpage separately. You should be doing that anyway.
There is no such thing as a summary feed, because every time you update your whole page gets crawled. This is more of a plus than anything else; your web page is out there already, now your readers will have smarter browsers. Win-win.
For little items like stock tickers, that’s more metadata with each item than content. But hey, now every page of yours is easily searchable and exportable with meaningful information (and hence easily importable).

There is nothing—nothing—that you’re going to publish on the web that HTML can’t describe. Indeed, that’s what RSS feeds contain anyway, in the <description> element. Styling feeds with XSLT for web browsers just shows how silly the whole idea is. You don’t store everything in an internal XML format waiting with customized XSL for each type of user agent, do you?

XHTML: it’s built for the future. Use it.

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The real issue, in my mind, is that there's a lot of extra crap in the xhtml main page that really doesn't belong in the syndication. Menus and link lists and all that crap. XML is nice. It's extensible, there are dozens of parsers out there, and it includes xhtml as a subset. By offering the RSS feed or ATOM feed in XML format, you get a couple of benefits over the whole xhtml file being sent each time.

The author can control how much content is being sucked in by other sites. The audience can browse through a list of excerpts to see if the article is worth visiting the page to read the rest of. An RSS file is smaller than the xhtml file it comes from, which saves on bandwidth (a nice feature if you become popular and have a million people checking every hour for updates). And a bunch of other things that I'm too tired to come up with
http://blog.peoii.com/index.php/archives/2004/06/04/reasons-for-rss/ Zen, and the Art of Blogging

Reasons for RSS
In another interesting post by Firas, he speaks about his views on why RSS is stupid, and again, I disagree, so lets get down to the reasons shall we?

FirasI just read the RSS 2.0 specification and The Atom Syndication Format 0.3 pre-draft. And I wo…

Firas Durri