I remember ( I may be very wrong ) eventually RSS and Atom became one and the same thing for consumer and that all RSS reader would parse Atom feed, RSS became the logo and the name people know, atom was used behind the scene.
Apart from iTunes, as the article said.
It has been 20+ years I do hope someone on HN can now spills the beans as to why.
> Gabriel offers the examples of the adoption of C over Lisp, Unix over Lisp machines and VMS, and x86 over reduced instruction set computers as examples of technically worse solutions defeating more elegant ones by arriving to market first.
Even (especially?) as a person that appreciates Lisp, Lisp losing this fight twice is kind of funny.
Wonder if it’s going to happen an nth time with Guix vs Nix
- since we are on the topic i got a question for you
- what is the best way to store rss data inside postgres
- will you store it as raw xml directly? or will you process it and store it?
- what format will you store it as if stored inside postgres?
- how will you handle updates to the feed? rss doesnt do websocket push as far as i can tell so you have to poll which gives you the entire feed with a few items removed and a few new items added in the best case scenario. how do you diff this for storing?
What? Not at all. RSS is a product category. Many RSS feeds are, if you look into them, Atom. Your RSS reader just doesn't bother to tell you, because why would you care?
Try putting a Betamax tape into a VHS VCR and see if you can watch it.
This is like pointing at the monitor of a desktop computer and saying, "that's the computer". It is effective to communicate with people who aren't interested in computers, but it's also not true and the distinction does have important consequences for behavior. Atom is not RSS even if some feed readers support both and most people don't know what feeds are.
And because of that, and the early popularity and widespread adoption of RSS, the better format (atom) isn't used nearly as much. And calls to increase use of betamax/atom generally went and go unheeded.
> and the early popularity and widespread adoption of RSS, the better format (atom) isn't used nearly as much.
That may have been true 20 years ago, but now that pretty much no-one uses either of them , I'd be surprised if RSS was still meaningfully more widespread than Atom. (Except everything is being called RSS).
Apart from iTunes, as the article said.
It has been 20+ years I do hope someone on HN can now spills the beans as to why.
Even (especially?) as a person that appreciates Lisp, Lisp losing this fight twice is kind of funny.
Wonder if it’s going to happen an nth time with Guix vs Nix
- what is the best way to store rss data inside postgres
- will you store it as raw xml directly? or will you process it and store it?
- what format will you store it as if stored inside postgres?
- how will you handle updates to the feed? rss doesnt do websocket push as far as i can tell so you have to poll which gives you the entire feed with a few items removed and a few new items added in the best case scenario. how do you diff this for storing?
Try putting a Betamax tape into a VHS VCR and see if you can watch it.
This is like pointing at the monitor of a desktop computer and saying, "that's the computer". It is effective to communicate with people who aren't interested in computers, but it's also not true and the distinction does have important consequences for behavior. Atom is not RSS even if some feed readers support both and most people don't know what feeds are.
And because of that, and the early popularity and widespread adoption of RSS, the better format (atom) isn't used nearly as much. And calls to increase use of betamax/atom generally went and go unheeded.
That may have been true 20 years ago, but now that pretty much no-one uses either of them , I'd be surprised if RSS was still meaningfully more widespread than Atom. (Except everything is being called RSS).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49141336 is the only valid response to your VHS/Betamax comparison, really.