Chris Hardie is, like me, a believer in RSS and considers it an important protocol that can be used for more than just following blogs. He considers the example of a municipal website that posts information of concern to its citizens. Suppose, he says, that a water main breaks, the water supply is compromised and the city tells its citizens to boil their water. When the water supply is safe again, the city will post an alert letting everyone know that they no longer need t boil their water.
If you’ve ever been through something like that you know it’s a pain and that you want to stop as soon as you can. What to do? You can check the city’s Website every time you need water but who wants to be checking a Website all the time?
But suppose the Website had an RSS feed. It’s easy to leverage this into an alert by piping into something like Slack or a simple notification app. The problem is, what if the city’s Website doesn’t have an RSS feed as many don’t.
Hardie has a couple of solutions but they’re complicated and more work than most people would be willing to do. That leads Hardie to make a plea: if you’re a Web developer or responsible for deploying one, please provide an RSS feed. It’s not hard and it can make a lot of difference to your users.