Dave Winer

It's unfortunate that XML has fallen so out of favor that well-made, strongly-schemad formats specified in XML, like Atom, are suffering in turn -- although reasons for feeds' demise go well beyond its forms-on-the-wire. This trend frustrates me, but it's undeniable that a lot of web data interchange happens with JSON-based formats nowadays, and the benefits of network effects, familiarity, and tooling support make JSONification worth exploring.

But even more frustrating is when a format comes out that's close to being a faithful translation of an established format, but makes small, incompatible changes that push the burden of faithful translation onto content authors, or the makers of third-party libraries.

I honestly don't intend to offer harsh targeted critique against the authors -- I assume good faith; more just voicing exasperation. There have been similar attempts over the years -- one from Dave Winer, the creator of RSS 0.92 and RSS 2.0, called RSS.js [1], which stoked some interest at first [2]; others by devs working in isolation without seeming access to a search engine and completely unaware of prior art; some who are just trying something unrelated and accidentally produce something usable [3]; finally, this question pops up from time to time on forums where people with an interest in this subject tend to congregate [4]. Meanwhile, real standards-bodies are off doing stuff that reframes the problem entirely [5] -- which seems out-of-touch at first, but I'd…

> The reason RSS failed to reach mainstream adoption by users is because it is not user friendly at all. While I love RSS myself, no amount of tech nerd nostalgia is going to make it popular enough that your mom starts using it.

I think it is a false premise that something is only valid if "mom starts using it". That is the profit-driven mentality. eg. "how can we market this? How can we expand RSS market share into valuable demographics?" etc

Also, I actually did teach my Mom to use RSS a decade ago and she still uses it today.

These concepts are really not that hard. I told my mom it was like she was getting a newsletter from her blogs delivered to a special dedicated inbox, but without cluttering up her email. She was delighted.

I think if someone knows how to use email, and knows how to browse the web, and knows how to sign up for email newsletters, they can handle RSS. I would argue that it is in many ways more useful for less computer literate people.

> Then comes the UX nightmare of actually finding the feed on each website you visit. If the site even has one.

This UX nightmare was solved 15 years ago. Browsers displayed a little icon in the corner when RSS is detected.[1], Firefox later displayed an RSS icon prominently in the address bar[2].

The UX nightmare was then re-introduced as the RSS icon was de-emphasized[3][4] and eventually dropped completely, with a dubious justification.[5]

[1]: https://www.hanselman.com/blog/FeedAutoDiscovery.aspx

[2]:…

The problem with name-and-shame posts, other than their juvenile premise, is that you can read up on what the people in question say, and call the author on their shit. Once you do this, you realize that one these objectors is not like the others, because once you discount the last few entrants' unjustified snake oil and utter quackery, you're left with Dave Winer's objections to Google's strategy on increasing the adoption of HTTPS by more and more explicit visual indicators of HTTP being 'non-secure' [1] and Mozilla's differently-worded, but comparable approach to 'deprecating' HTTP.

By cherry-picking his most abrasive soundbites and his most entitled-sounding Twitter replies, Scott handwaves away Dave's more reasoned frustrations, such as his 2016 lament [3] that his current webhost doesn't offer a no-cost, push-button way of enabling HTTPS, and that his long-runing, statically-hosted blog would now require ongoing maintenance to stay compliant with the ever-changing list of requirements Chrome and Mozilla set in service of a larger goal. He wonders that if UI changes don't have the effect Chrome and Mozilla are hoping for, will more drastic changes follow, like refusing to display HTTP pages altogether, and reading his words he doesn't appear to buy that static, read-only sites need strong assurances of identity and resistance from third-party tampering, especially not at the risk of potentially making access to those pages impaired in the most popular browsers…

That is by the way not alternative history but where RSS started.

Ok, not directly. First it started as a proto semantic web protocol, at Netscape to syndicate links and titles for their portal.

Then Dave Winer used RSS to syndicate his weblog, scripting.com and started the marriage of blogs and feeds. But blogs at that time were more small paragraphs, less big articles. And every paragraph was syndicated. That's still visible in archives of long running blogs:

• http://scripting.com/2001/09/11.html

• https://kottke.org/98/12/

… which seems a lot twitter like. The focus on longer articles in blogging is something which started later, in 2001 or so, in my recollection.

Btw: Following those blurb-like RSS feeds in a traditional RSS reader with read markers is overwhelming, in my experience. I banned all those feeds into a "High Volume" folder where I more often than not mark all as read just to get ahead.

Microsoft's big blunder is that they assume that "developer" is synonymous with "Windows developer."

They have excellent tools available for Windows developers. But step out of that silo and man, just forget it. You have to fight your own system every step of the way.

This is an example of a strategy tax (http://scripting.com/davenet/2001/04/30/strategyTax.html): Microsoft's strategy for a loooong time was to pretend like Windows was the only thing that existed. When Windows was a majority monoculture, this worked pretty well for them. But now that it's just one ecosystem among many, it forces their developer-tools people to pull their punches so as to avoid undercutting their Windows people.

> We’ve come to believe that the best way for us to improve people’s productivity going forward is to streamline the workflows that generate so much email in the first place.

AKA Paper --> https://paper.dropbox.com

I don't know if I understand what Dropbox is anymore. It's gone from: syncing file storage --> a decentralized app ecosystem that in some ways competes with PaaS (effectively an OS [1]) --> document and media collaboration tools.

They might be one of the only companies whose products compete with Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon...

Just to clarify, I think they've done all of these things well.

1: http://scripting.com/liveblog/users/davewiner/2015/12/07/0593.html