https://thepcspy.com/read/what-happened-to-rss/

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Wait! What happened to RSS?!

Friday, 10 June 2022 -- webdev, rss

While I was busy aging like soft cheese, someone killed-off RSS. It
used to be everywhere. Now it's gone; hidden or dead.

How do you kids stay up to date with websites? I keep pushing a RSS
feed but do you know what it does? How are websites supposed to
advertise update-subscriptions?

[rss]

Really Simple Syndication was invented in the Cretaceous period,
roughly 100 million years ago. It enabled websites' fans to get
updates, quickly and easily. It got used for everything else too and
remains a fundamental part of podcasting, but in the explosion of Web
2.0, it was a very serious part of websites keeping in touch with
their user-bases.

I recently restored the Subscribe Icon back to the main navigation
here when it started to dawn on me...

Does anyone actually know what to do with an RSS feed?

[xml]

Once upon a time you clicked a link to a RSS feed, you'd see an
option to do something with it: save a live bookmark in Firefox, or
add it to Google Reader. Both long dead. There still are a clutch
other readers today, but the automated handling of this, and
seemingly the desire of browsers to handle this seems to have
evaporated, leaving novices in the lurch.

If you click a link to my main feed, [S:your browser might
pretty-format the XML code but that's all the help you get:S]. Update
: The raw RSS is now styled via XLST so it does at least look better
than a page of XML. More at the end.

You still need to take that URL and manually plumb it into something
that will poll it for updates. And that relies on you knowing what it
is. So straw poll, please. If you don't know anything about RSS, let
this old doughnut know and I'll stop pushing it. Ideally you'll also
have an answer to my next question...

So, how do people subscribe to websites in 2022?

[fellowkids]

I'm people so I'll go first: I still use RSS. I use Feedly to get
updates from about a hundred websites, and Hacker News, and I'm happy
with my wash. This is how it's been for a decade.

That's where my consternation originated. Do people just consume what
they're now fed through Platforms: Facebook, Twitter and Tiktok?
Would I have to hawk myself on each platform? I'm concerned that's
just feeding the problem. It's not even apparent how websites are
doing this either now. I know I've hacked together a few feed
generators for websites without RSS, just so I can get updates.

I want to know how you handle updates. Please tell me in the comments
or by email.

Why are Google, Microsoft and Apple so inactive here?

It's super easy to blame "The Rise of Platforms", but hard to ignore
that the big desktop and mobile operating systems have done nothing
to help. Browser vendors washed their hands of RSS. What's especially
galling is these companies run personalised news aggregation services
, but none lets you add your own feeds. I'd think that each of them
has a vested interest in reining back control of web consumption.
Maybe the EU can mandate RSS support.

I don't have a high note to end on here. I stopped paying attention
and the world changed on me, and I can't figure out why. I just feel
old.

Update: Use XLST to make it pretty

[xlst]

So my biggest single complaint was that linking somebody to an RSS
feed could mean confusing a novice. XLST came up a few times in your
comments and emails, and comments on Hacker News. Big thanks. XLST is
a templating and styling language for XML and it has good browser
support.

My XLST is super-simple, have a look. Replicating the site's
super-simple HTML in XLST was easy so it reuses the CSS too. Boom.
Much better.

I've dropped in a message explaining what RSS is, that you need an
aggregator. It might be nice to offer email subscriptions from here
directly one day.

CSS layouts are so much better than they used to be
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