RSS is pretty simple. In fact, RSS wears a big t-shirt that says, "Simple is my middle name." Publishers are adopting RSS all over the place and advertisers are trying to figure out how to reach this elusive and finicky audience of early adopters, but RSS is a pretty unfriendly medium for advertising compared to the regular Web or even spam (formerly known as "email").
Me? I love RSS. I couldn't keep up with the embarrassingly small percentage of WIN sites I read if I didn't have FeedDemon, but there are a few things I wish RSS and feed readers could do. Many solutions to RSS problems involve server-side scripting - like the HTTP Conditional GET, which spares Web servers some of the load of repeated requests for feeds that have not changed - but scripting can only do so much.
Clarification: one reader pointed out that Conditional GETs don't require scripting. That is correct, but basic Conditional GETs will still serve your entire 120K XML file even if only one item has been added. Combining Conditional GETs with a server-side script that returns only the new posts is the only way I'd ever want to do Conditional GETs so I consider this a "scripting" solution.
Authentication
Not just for subscribing to content, but some people want the ease-of-use of RSS for a private news feed. If someone knows the URL, they can read your feed.
Dynamic content
Like email, you cannot change the content of a feed once it has gone out the door. But worse than email, if you do change content after it has made its way to feed readers, many of them will do redlining and show you exactly what changes were made. Is it a good thing or a bad thing that they are constantly pulling down new versions for comparison? Maybe it's a good thing to know that someone removed a paragraph that changes the entire tone of their post, but if I fix a misspelling, add a missing word or change my punctuation, do you really want to see little red underlines and strikethrough everywhere?
Advertising and personalization
Without cookies and JavaScript support, you cannot intelligently serve ads in your RSS feeds. If you put an ad in with every post and people look at the 10-at-a-time view in their feed readers, they see ten copies of the same ad all on one screen. This discourages bloggers from putting ads in their feeds, which, in turn, discourages them from putting all of their content into their feeds.
RSS doesn't know what a post is
I mean, RSS is all about showing you posts, but when bloggers switch from excerpts to full posts in their feeds, most feed readers load all 20 stories again as if they were new. The feed reader only knows which post is which by the date, title and content. Those are all blogger-editable. If I edit a title, does that make it a new post?
The Atom spec addresses unique identifiers for posts with its "atom:id" element. Atom also takes the syndication to the next level allowing you to move content in and out, not just out, but it doesn't address the "dumb client" issues.
Update: another reader pointed out that RSS feeds can have <guid> elements. Back when I was writing our feed functions, there was confusion as to what <link> and <guid> elements stood for. Some people used <link> to indicate the permalink and others used <link> for the external URL you are blogging to let the world know about. <guid permalink = "true"> is the right way to permanently identify a unique post. And, oh, look at that -- our feeds are full of <guid>'s now. Thanks!
To be fair, HTML doesn't do any of this either. HTTP - the communication between Web servers and browsers - handles all of these things. But feed readers use HTTP to get RSS files from Web servers. Why don't feed readers support more HTTP features? When Internet Explorer and Safari have built-in feed readers, will RSS feeds suddenly become more dynamic and powerful?
What would you like to see RSS and feed readers do?
1. I use rss for real estate agent to inform of new messages from website. What I do is leave the rss pretty empty - title only.. then link to page that is private
Posted at 4:44AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Joel Goldstick