Thanks for sharing, i almost was not sure if the last part was sarcasm. Html itself was the standard, then when it got bloated we got rss. This seems like it’s not a problem of a lack of standards. It’s the company choosing not to promote it.

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WackyFighter 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

It is more to do with the fact that vast majority of people aren't going to bother subscribing to an RSS feed. I am on a freelancer slack group that supposed to have a RSS feed for jobs. The feed is often broken for weeks because most people don't use it.

Even when it isn't broken the display output is broken in Thunderbird because the dev isn't going to bother checking Thunderbird as many people don't use email clients like that anymore and instead use webmail.

I never have used RSS that much as normally if I want to check for new things on a site, I will just go to the site and look myself.

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treesknees 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I suppose I meant more of a best practice - if every news site could be found at the subdomain of lite.XYZ.com, or perhaps some way for the browser to request specifically no images or styles, it’d be easier for the end user to find.

RSS is a good point that I didn’t consider. Although it tends to be a summary and hyperlink to the main site.

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IanCal 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Ideally IMO this would be accept headers. You're asking for the same semantic content but a different format. I'm not sure if there's a nice way of specifying html but in a minimal sense (we do quality with images, perhaps linked), however these could mostly be text/plain or text/markdown (and it'd be nice if that was then formatted properly by the browser).

This often makes a really nice API if you can do other formats too - the main page of cnn could respond to rss accept headers and give me a feed for example.

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QuantumNomad_ 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

It’s too bad that WML from WAP is not used anymore.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Markup_Language

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Application_Protocol

WML pages had mostly text and hyperlinks from what I remember and even though it supported images too I think most such basic pages would be readable even if you turned image loading off.

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duggan 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

I spent so much time tuning the WAP site for the forum I worked for back in 2008.

I had some sort of Nokia running on whatever 2kbps networking was going then, and would shave absolutely anything I could to make the forums load slightly faster.

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IanCal 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

We could use markdown.

	▲	ahazred8ta 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		It's a crying shame that a browser can't fetch a plain vanilla goodstuff.md file and display it natively.

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johncolanduoni 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

RSS is just a list of links to webpages, maybe with summaries. The readers generally fetch those webpages and filter out the text, but every browser has equivalent functionality now. You can do it with literally any HTML page, though some websites try to fight it (since depending on the reader, it neuters ads).

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what 3 days ago | parent [-]

RSS feeds used to contain the full article. That changed when everyone wanted to monetize their blogs.

	▲	manuelmoreale 2 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		RSS still contains full articles on a lot of personal sites. As you said, it’s about monetisation and control and when you’re writing with no plan to monetize there’s no point in not serving full content.
	▲	johncolanduoni 2 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Yeah, and that’s my point. The problem is not technological, you can make a super readable HTML site by just putting text in <p> tags, and RSS readers for blogs that didn’t rug-pull their content still work fine. People lost interest in giving out something for nothing, so now the web is an ad-infested mess. If someone makes a new tech that makes that impossible, 10 principled FSF-enjoyers will write content for it and nobody else. Web standard bloat is bad, but it didn’t cause this problem, and you can’t fix it by creating a new spec.