RSS Ignominy
For almost as long as this blog has been running, I have been providing an RSS feed. I’ve complained before about the shitty support for RSS, and now I’m complaining again because things actually seem to be getting worse.
For whatever reason, it now appears that the two major Webkit browsers, Safari and Chrome, have dropped native support for RSS, instead respectively offering the following when you click on a feed link.
Wow that really helps, guys. What user not already familiar with RSS is ever going to go install support for feeds into their browser when they already have little to no idea how feeds are used?
Firefox has not broken their support yet, for what it’s worth. When you click on a feed link you get a preview of the posts as well as the option to subscribe directly using a few preset methods. This at least gives some idea why you might want to use a feed (to subscribe FFS).
Another nail in the RSS coffin is Twitter’s announcement that they won’t be supporting it in the future, in keeping with their new ‘fuck you’ policy on how twitter data is used by 3rd party applications.
So basically it appears the only way to make sure users will get a consistent experience when they click on your little orange feed link is to set up a FeedBurner account and send them there instead.
This is a totally bullshit solution in my opinion; FeedBurner looks like it hasn’t been updated in years, and since Google now owns it it’s one of those half-assed services that feels like it could be shuttered at any time. And yet it appears to be the only practical option right now.
long live rss! I rarely visit websites directly
ooh that g2 thing again
You hit on my feelings exactly. Oddly, or perhaps not oddly we have entered an age where everyone holds their (our) data hostage. Before Facebook, those of us on the web understood the technology behind it at least a little bit better than your average Facebook or Twitter user, we would have demanded an RSS or at least an Atom feed from any website we used.
Those of us who know about such things as RSS are the minority now and the Facebooks, Twitters and what have you are doing their best so that the average use never learns about the power of RSS.
rssowl