Deprecating RSS Support

7 comments

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1. Winst, November 23, 2003

   Because there are religious wars over which is the "best" version of RSS. Some people seem to have fierce opinions about this. It would be nice to just let everybody have their favourite rather than "taking sides." Does it add a significant amount of overhead (human, machine, or financial)?

2. Ross, November 24, 2003

   Yeah, I get the religiousity of the question of "best", but my guess is that our users won't - and probably won't care. They are going to be more interested in the features that their RSS offers and what benefits that RSS offers them.
   There's no real cost to supporting two or three or five versions, until the differences between those various versions are so great that the benefits offered to users of those feeds are substantially different - that's where significant support and maintenance costs come into play.
   I'm tossing around the idea that perhaps we should just pick a horse and give it to our users in order that we can give them the best possible feed that we can and not make them pick. After all, selecting an RSS feed type isn't something that the average bear is going to need to understand in order to use the product. If it works, why clutter up the UI and confuse the customer even further by asking them questions that are only really required to placate an almost irrelevant religious sect.
   Perhaps this response should have been an entry instead ;)

3. Winst, November 26, 2003

   Well, most of the features in blogware are things that most users won't touch.
   We're not really asking the customer to answer this question. They probably won't even find the place to change this if they don't ask for it. Like all the other features in blogware, if they don't care, they'll leave it alone. If they do care, they already know exactly which one they want and why. I don't think that 5 (or 10) items on a drop-down menu is more cluttered than 2 -- especially when they're in numerical order.
   If it's a problem on the back end to support it, I can see considering dropping it. But as far as improving customer experience, I think this change would be invisible to all customers except for those who prefer the version(s) you're deciding not to support.

4. Winst, November 26, 2003

   Cool. The replies are indenting. When did this start?

5. TheRoss, January 3, 2004

   I'd vote for just picking one (but I'm not a Blogware customer). RSS 1.0 if you value RDF, RSS 2.0 if you don't.

6. Ross, January 3, 2004

   ...and what about Atom feeds now that its becoming a dot on reality's horizon?

7. TheRoss, January 4, 2004

   That's trickier-
   If people start building cool stuff around Atom, it be a shame to be left out. Any justification for abandoning one in favor of the other is probably a year or more away.
   But that's just me pulling guesses out of my ass.