Talk:feed

From IndieWeb

Tone and message

I have found the tone of this page a bit problematic. That might be overstating it, actually, but it is a bit concerning. I am trying to figure out why exactly and bring constructive feedback.

I am all in favor of using h-feed microformats and am excited by the work being done to to set up readers to consume them. However, I think this represents a very small population of the web and I feel like XML feeds are going to be around for quite a long time yet. I feel like this page unfairly treats feeds as an either-or, as if to say, "You could use old, crusty, complicated XML feeds, or you could use the new hotness, h-feed!"

I don't see why there can't be both. Pretty much every mainstream blogging software (e.g. WordPress) supports XML feeds out of the box and works without problems. This page makes it sound like it's incredibly difficult to have an XML feed in addition to blog content, but I don't feel like that's an accurate portrayal.

I raised a question/concern about h-feed specific to my site: I have chosen a single-post-per-page format for articles on my site and plan to keep it that way for the forseeable future. I can easily mark those up with h-feed microformatts, but it seems inefficient for an h-feed reader to need to poll 10 different URLs to retrieve my 10 latest posts (vs. polling a single XML file). This is just a potential shortcoming, not an argument against h-feed.

Tantek suggested I could set up an h-feed on a separate URL, but that would also violate DRY β€” which I think is one of the strongest criticisms of XML on this page.

These are some initial thoughts. I figured I would get the conversation started.

β€” gRegor (talk) 21:27, 24 March 2014 (PDT)