Matt Rickard has a—at least to me—provocative post on RSS. As I’ve said many times, I’m a big believer in and user of RSS. Google did its best to kill it off but it turned out to be too useful to discard. Along with the excellent Elfeed it’s my main way of discovering and curating interesting blog posts.
That’s why I disagree with several of Rickard’s points. Rickard appears to take the point of view of a content creator interested in monetizing content. That’s a valid viewpoint, of course, but I look at it from a user’s point of view and very much like the way it works.
Rickard notes that the typical RSS entry is much like an email. It doesn’t render HTML very well and certainly doesn’t support Javascript. Rickard says that’s okay for email but not for general blog content. Perhaps, but I use RSS to point me to interesting blog posts—that I read with my browser—not as the primary way to consume a post. Indeed, many of the RSS entries don’t have the whole post and some have only the title. I like the primarily text based entry that renders quickly and helps me decide if a post is interesting enough to read.
At the other end of the spectrum, Rickard says “discovering a feed and seeing raw XML was too technical for the average user.” Well yeah but who reads the raw XML? I’d guess virtually no one. There’s nothing hard about subscribing to a feed either. Usually it’s just clicking on a link. It’s true you have to already know about a site to subscribe but that’s true no matter how you consume it.
Rickard doesn’t seem to be against RSS. He just notes that it’s not ideal for commercial content creators and doesn’t look as nice as a blog post rendered in a browser.
Although those who want to hoover up your Web activity or sell you things have done their best to put a full stop to RSS, users love it and keep it going. As the name suggests it’s a simple protocol and doesn’t require much maintenance. I, for one, hope it’s with us for a long time.