I was hoping that people would see RSS as a key to decentralization, but it's hard to draw the picture because people have the wrong idea about RSS.#
I had a similar problem explaining why a Pub-sub company should support RSS without thinking of it as a "third party opportunity."#
Pub-sub could use a "really simple" interface. You could send any kind of message with RSS, and the knowledge of how to find the new stuff in a feed is totally established in developer-land.#
And that's what the Pub-sub people wanted. Ideas for new simple APIs. They look down on RSS as beneath them. I've seen "serious" devs do that over and over and it's a mistake. Simple is better, not trivial. Microsoft, for example, had something "much better" than RSS coming in the late 90s. Eventually they did get on board with RSS, to their credit.#
Sometimes the answer is so obvious you can't even see it. #
Last update: Saturday January 21, 2023; 5:39 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! :-)