They love RSS 8 ▲ unstory 55 days ago · Tech · hide · 7 comments "Thank you for using RSS." "I love RSS." A badge in the footer. A little heart, a blogroll. Community. Belonging. I love TCP/IP. I love HTTP 1.1. I love DNS resolution. Where is my badge. Where is my directory. Nobody forms a tribe around plumbing. You use it. You don't announce it. You don't put a sticker in your footer that says "I love packet switching." RSS is plumbing. A transport format. XML with angle brackets and escaped HTML and a version attribute and the CDATA hack. You don't love it. Your software parses it for you, and you never open the file. You never see the escaping, and you never deal with one misplaced whitespace that breaks the whole document. HTML is forgiving. Browsers render garbage. XML is not. One character and the feed is dead. The person with the heart in their footer would not survive writing one item by hand. Their love is for the club, not the file. It's standard flag overlay. The announcement replaces the doing. They call it RSS reader, RSS feed.… Log in to reply on the Fediverse. Comments will appear here. Dr. Jab @jacabo@piaille.fr 52 days ago [-] "They love RSS. RSS is plumbing. A transport format. XML with angle brackets and escaped HTML and a version attribute and the CDATA hack. You don't love it. Your software parses it for you, and you never open the file. [...] The badge is not about the format. The badge is the belonging. The directory is the clubhouse. The blogroll is the member list. Nobody is reading anyone. Everyone is engraving a heart on a grave."I strongly disagree with this take. I do love a privacy respecting, easy to use, well formated web reading experience, without add nor fuss. RSS may only be a machine-friendly format, but it's the backbone of a better web. Peasante @Peasante@gaygeek.social 51 days ago [-] @jacabo Yes, but the point of this post is the performative gesture of announcing and putting a little badge at the bottom of your blog. Dr. Jab @jacabo@piaille.fr 51 days ago [-] @PeasanteI still don't see the problem with that. It raises awareness about the existence of RSS, which is still very low! And helps visitors to find the url to the feed. Sometimes, these URLs are quite obscure, and you have to use discover tools to find them. A badge I can click and forward to my aggregator is of great help. newsonaut @newsonaut@mstdn.ca 50 days ago [-] @jacabo @Peasante You’re right. This post seems unnecessarily cynical and dismissive. Robert Kingett @WeirdWriter@caneandable.social 50 days ago [-] ℹ️ deleted status ℹ️ theTangent.Space @theTangentSpace@mathstodon.xyz 50 days ago [-] @jacabo yeah this is a weird take. People "love RSS" because of what it — as a tool — enables them to do. It doesn't mean they enjoy handwriting XML documents. This is like saying someone doesn't really love computers if they don't enjoy soldering chipsets (or even doping silicon) by hand. The badge is a statement that this technology is still used and appreciated, despite some big companies removing support for RSS because it doesn't fit their business model Rosalie @Rosalieeee@mastodon.social 48 days ago [-] Like others have said, this is a weird take. "They" love being able to share their posts on a feed without depending on an algorithm or someone else's server. It's like devs having an HTML or CSS sticker on their laptop. They don't like the Hyper Text Markup Language in particular, but they like what it represents, what it allows them to do.
