Re: Re: Can someone explain what's so great about RSS?

On 8/1/05, Matthew Weier O'Phinney <mweierophinney@gmail.com> wrote: > * Justin Patrin <papercrane@gmail.com>: > > I've been seeing RSS gaining more and more popularity over the last > > years and I simply do not understand why. Why is RSS so great? What > > does it do that is so great and wonderful? The only thing it seems to > > have over anything else is that it's using XMLwith a standardized > > format. Other than that, RSS seems to me to be not any more useful > > than, say, a daily e-mail with news (or whatever) from whatever you're > > getting the RSS from. > > RSS is one-to-many communication, and is mainly used to indicate when > content changes. Some of its characteristics: > > * Unlike newsletters, RSS can be completely anonymous -- one may > subscribe to an RSS feed without providing any personal information > (though RSS is flexible enough that it's possible to require this, > should the site owner so desire). "subscribe" being a generous term here as you're not actually subscribing to anything, as you have pointed out. You're really just telling yoru feed reader to read a new feed. > * Like NNTP, it's self-expiring -- an RSS feed only contains a set > amount of entries at any given time, and pushes older ones off the > list (typical counts are 10 items, but for high-volume sites like > freshmeat.net, for instance, this may be 50 or 100). This also means > that should you not check for a period of time -- several days or > weeks -- you will not see old entries, only the newest ones. Which is another issue, IMHO. If you want to be up to date you want to see *all* entries. Miss a day and *whoops* you missed a bunch of stuff. This is part of why I like my Slashdot e-mails. I can not read them for a week (if I don't have the time) and go back and read them all later on. > * Like a website, RSS is a pull (not push) technology. This means the > site does not need to keep track of subscribers, which can be a boon > when dealing with CAN-SPAM and other legislation. True. > * RSS readers allow the user to categorize feeds much like mail, and to > keep track of un/read feeds/entries. Which brings up my point again. If it's so much like mail....why not just have it *be* mail? > > If you use Firefox, you can experience RSS via the LiveBookmarks system, Very disappointing to say the least. Yay, I can manually click on a drop-down to see what's current. Just another thing to distract me....(something new yet? something new yet? Oh, only one thing?) > or via a variety of plugins such as Sage. Which never seemed to be that useful, although they may have improved. > Thunderbird has RSS built-in > in recent versions. I'm checking into it now. > There are also a variety of web-based ones. > > I'd say, try it out, see for yourself. I tried it out back when the buzz started up. It wasn't useful so I left it alone. > > -- > Matthew Weier O'Phinney > Zend Certified Engineer > http://weierophinney.net/matthew/ > > -- > PEAR General Mailing List (http://pear.php.net/) > To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php > > -- Justin Patrin