
I'm re-thinking RSS now - sp8
http://scripting.com/2020/01/19/145834.html?title=imRethinkingRssNow
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Wowfunhappy
> As Twitter discovered, its style of writing doesn't fit into the model of
> RSS.

It doesn't?

> People were disappointed when they stopped publishing tweets via RSS. But
> this was the right thing to do, in hindsight. It wasn't working.

Why wasn't it working?

I'll admit I've never used Twitter's RSS feeds—because at the time it was
around, I was a teenager with no use for RSS. But I can't imagine why RSS as a
protocol would be unable to represent tweets.

Whether any given RSS reader has an optimal UI for _displaying_ tweets is
another matter. But the great thing about interoperable protocols is that the
content and client are separate. The client can be adapted and improved to fit
your needs, if you want.

~~~
mattdw
He's pretty clear in the article that it's the "title-description-body" model
that doesn't work -- tweets don't generally benefit from a title or a summary.

~~~
Wowfunhappy
...am I not seeing the whole article somehow? The page I'm seeing is five
short paragraphs, which don't mention that model.

Anyway, it seems to me you should leave those fields out if they aren't
applicable.

~~~
zamadatix
I wouldn't say it's clear by any means but follow the "in 2017" link. After
reading that page if it doesn't make sense why simply leaving those fields out
wouldn't work follow a few more links in any of the articles and then try
rereading the "in 2017" link.

It's not so much "is it possible to push arbitrary text in RSS" as it is "is
it possible to push the writing flow in RSS".

~~~
davewiner
I've been writing about this for a while, I don't repeat everything in every
post, which is probably why it was confusing.

Anyway, what Twitter did is repeat the body of the tweet in the title and
description sub-elements of item.

The reason they did this is probably that the dominant reader of the day,
Google Reader, pretty much required titles. So when you'd read a tweet in a
feed reader you'd see the text of the tweet twice. Not a good user experience.

The problem isn't with RSS, because it allows for titleless items, rather with
the reader.

And that problem is still with us today because there isn't much consistency
among the readers other than the Google Reader model. They are all following
GR, not RSS.

And that makes tweet-like-things-in-RSS pretty much a non-starter.

For examples, look at my blog on any given day most of what's there is too
short to have a title, like a tweet.

[http://scripting.com/](http://scripting.com/)

Hope this helps.

