Skip navigation.

Blog

Skip the blog side panel.

On 23rd of April 2015, Mihai Șucan passed away due to metastatic cancer caused by RDEB.

My name is Mihai and I work on the Firefox developer tools. When it comes to web development, I like both server-side and client-side work. I am mainly interested in web browsers, web standards and related technologies.

(Why) RSS is crap

29 July 2006, 17:34

Hello!

<rant>

I'll try to keep this blog post short: RSS is crap.

  1. RSS is not only one file format. RSS refers to multiple file formats which resemble each other.
  2. Thus, various RSS versions are incompatible.
  3. There are around 10 incompatible versions as of writing this. maybe I don't even know them all. By the time you read my post, there might be more.
  4. RSS 2.0 is good, it serves its purpose.
  5. RSS 2.0 is not crap.
  6. Same goes for any of the versions you pick.
  7. Problem is the entire RSS.
  8. Thus implementation is suddenly hard, for a supposedly simple format.

Recommended reading: The myth of RSS compatibility by Mark Pilgrim. Thanks to his post, I can implement better RSS support.

Solution: use Atom wisely:

  1. It's as easy as RSS 2.0, if you ignore all the other capabilities you don't need.
  2. It's better documented.
  3. It's easier to implement.
  4. It's not crap.

</rant>

Thanks :).

Published in: atom, rss, xml.