It's even worse than it appears.
Monday November 4, 2019; 11:42 AM EST
JsonFeed after two years#
  • A couple of years later, I've yet to see a JsonFeed in the wild. And if such a thing existed, I suspect there would also be an RSS 2.0 version of the same content. In the group where developers discuss it, which I follow, most or all of the feature requests are things that have already been done in RSS or Atom.#
  • There was, provably, no reason to do this. At this point, is there a language or environment that doesn't have an open source library for reading feeds? It's just one call in my JavaScript code to take a bit of text that's supposed to be a feed and get back a JavaScript structure with the contents. Couldn't be simpler. Yet I don't think many of those libraries include support for this two-year-old format. So you have to do more work to read it. One of the goals of the new format was that it would be less work. #
  • And on the writing side, maybe writing JSON is a little easier than writing XML, but again, if 20 years after the advent of RSS, you don't have a toolkit in your environment to write feeds, you should probably do it yourself and share it with other devs. #
  • Finally if you were going to invent a new format why not just JSONify an existing feed structure. I did that for RSS in a few minutes. My blog is still available in JSON as well as XML. No need for debates or feature requests. It's RSS but in JSON. It Just Works™. Not that anyone uses it, for the reasons mentioned above. #
  • I've known both Manton and Brent, the authors of the format, for many years. Nice people. But this was a mistake. Atom, also, was a mistake. All the energy should have been focused on a standard that would be supported everywhere, as easily as possible. I did it myself. I had designed a format when RSS came along, from Netscape, and I dropped it in favor of RSS, because one way to do something is better than two no matter how much better the second way is. A hard-won lesson from many times around the loop. Hopefully this is something will not be repeated for RSS at least, in the future. #

© 1994-2019 Dave Winer.

Last update: Saturday November 23, 2019; 12:58 PM EST.

You know those obnoxious sites that pop up dialogs when they think you're about to leave, asking you to subscribe to their email newsletter? Well that won't do for Scripting News readers who are a discerning lot, very loyal, but that wouldn't last long if I did rude stuff like that. So here I am at the bottom of the page quietly encouraging you to sign up for the nightly email. It's got everything from the previous day on Scripting, plus the contents of the linkblog and who knows what else we'll get in there. People really love it. I wish I had done it sooner. And every email has an unsub link so if you want to get out, you can, easily -- no questions asked, and no follow-ups. Go ahead and do it, you won't be sorry! :-)