Dev-Picayune

Several (and appologies for not providing links) bloggers and columnists have remarked lately about the problem with RSS (to one degree or another) and that is that it isn’t really very simple. I don’t mean to say that the XML part of it isn’t simple because I find it pretty straight-forward (although I find the RSS 1.0 spec to be a bit uglier at times). The ultimate problem going on is that there is a lack of a reliable mechanism to deal with RSS feeds.
One proposal has been to create a “feed://” protocol or list links that way and have the RSS reader register itself as the default “feed://” reader. The problem with this method is that there really isn’t a “feed://” protocol. RSS feeds (ultimately just an XML file) are typically served via HTTP.
The other part of the problem is with integration between the browser and the RSS reader. Firefox has resolved part of the problem by at least identifying most pages that have RSS feeds and allowing for a very simplistic method for getting at the feeds. The Sage Plug-In for Firefox simplifies this further by being integrated into the browser and really handling the feed management (and discovery part) quite well. But Sage has a couple of drawbacks… What if you don’t want to start your browser to read RSS feeds? What if you want to archive all entries from blogs you read? Or search within all the entries across all those blogs?
Thunderbird email comes with RSS reader capabilities that appear to go slightly beyond Sage (in terms of reading and searching, etc.), but just adding a feed to it is painful (I have found importing my Sage OPML is more useful). But ultimately, between the default behavior of downloading the message (and formatting) from the web-site and then not being able to change that without deleting and readding the feed, Thunderbird seems to fall extremely short of ideal. This is a real shame since to me, the email program is the ideal place for the RSS reader to live. Ultimately, if you look at RSS like individual email messages from someone, it seems to make sense to keep it in the same place.
I’ve looked at several other RSS readers like BlogBridge and now most recently RSS Bandit. One nice thing with RSS Bandit (as compared to its awful name and icon) is that it does register itself as a feed:// reader and therefore, with an additional plug-in to Firefox, I can just click on the RSS icon in Firefox to register a feed in RSS Bandit. But now I end up with a large additional client piece of software that lives outside the browser and outside my email program.
When you look at the effects of the problem, what you end up with is a slightly tricky technology (RSS) that is being underutilized because people don’t know what it is and when they do try to use it, find it clunky to use or can’t get it to work at all. So what’s the right solution?