LinLog

It's been kind of a busy weekend and I didn't have any good posts queued up, so in lieu of real content, this week I'm posting kitty pictures.

These are Cagney and Lacey, my mother's new kittens.  They're about two months old and yes, they're named after the TV show.  We went to visit this weekend to celebrate my son's birthday and got to see them for the first time.  My son has never gotten to play with kittens before and had a wonderful time with them.

In fact, the kittens were a big hit all around.  We had a small family party with my cousins' kids and they all spent quite a bit of time playing with Cagney and Lacey. 

We had originally been planning to have a big birthday party at the Brick Lab and invite all the kids from school, but the pandemic blew that plan out of the water.  So instead he had a little party with five of his cousins.  We had pizza and cupcakes out in the yard.  The weather was beautiful.  The kids had a treasure hunt, played with foam swords, and generally had a great time.  It wasn't what we originally wanted, but it was a very good day.

Author's Note: This entry from my archives was written on March 18, 2007 and has been sitting in my drafts folder ever since.  Not sure why I didn't publish it at the time.  I think I was going to add more, but never got around to it.  At any rate, this was back then RSS feeds were a trendy, new-ish thing and this article was supposed to be a less technical discussion of what they are and why they're good.

These days, of course, RSS is passé, and when people refer to a "feed", it's usually coming from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or whatever vendor-locked service the kids are using this week.  I find this sad.  The idea of the open web was so promising, but not that much really came of it.  Instead of being spoon-fed our information and entertainment by big media companies via broadcast and print media, we're now spoon-fed our information and entertainment via the internet by big tech companies.  And this time, the content is not selected by gate-keeping editors, but by AI algorithms that are tuned to feed us whatever will keep us clicking, with little to no regard for whether it's true, useful, or even remotely good for us.

For the record, I still use RSS feeds all the time.  I use the Tiny Tiny RSS aggregator, which is quite nice, to read the various blogs and news that I'm interested in following.  I have accounts with a few of the big social media platforms, but I rarely ever read them and never post anything.  I find them to be a huge time-sink and not especially conducive to good mental health, and so better off avoided.  Of course, your mileage may vary, but just keep in mind that you don't need to look at these sites - if anything truly important happens, someone will tell you about it.  I mean, unless you're a shut-in with no friends or family.  In that case, maybe social media is a good thing for you.  

At any rate, these were my thoughts in 2007.  Perhaps they'll be interesting or enlightening.  Or perhaps entertaining in their naivete.  Enjoy!

If you frequent tech sites or weblogs, you've probably seen the RSS icon or the XML feed icon .  You may also have seen other icons or text links referring to XML feeds, RSS, or even podcasts.  In fact, if you're using a web browser other than Internet Explorer, you may have seen one of these icons pop up in the address bar or status bar.  In this article, I will try to explain, in layman's terms, what RSS is and why it is so useful and important to the future of the internet.

What is RSS?

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication.  As this name suggests, it is a syndication format.  

By "syndication," we mean essentially the same thing as when we talk about syndicated television shows.  A syndicated TV show is one that is shown on multiple independent channels at the same time, as opposed to being exclusive to a single network.  So for example, a syndicated show in the United States might be broadcast by NBC, Fox, the Sci-Fi channel, and USA all at the same time.

RSS works the same way.  An RSS file, usually referred to as a feed, contains a list of recent updates to a site.  The site operators publish this file on the web site and allow other people to subscribe to it, which is really just a fancy way of saying they automatically download it on a regular basis.  These people can then "republish" the information, either by incorporating it into their own sites or simply reading it into a desktop application.  The idea is that if the site's operators update the RSS feed every time they update the site, anyone who subscribes to it will automatically get the next "episode" the next time he downloads the file.

But what would I do with it?

If you are not already familiar with RSS, you may be wondering why anyone would bother with this.  After all, if you just want to read the updates of a site, isn't it just as easy to read the home page?  

At this point, you may be thinking that this doesn't sound much different from just visiting the web site in question.  After all, why would you want to bother with this RSS thing when you can just go to the site's home page like you've been doing for years?  

You wouldn't be wrong to think that.  If you're talking about just one site, with one set of updates to track, then RSS doesn't make any sense.  It would just be a different way of doing the same thing.

The beauty of RSS is that, unlike a web page, you can easily write a program to break up the information and organize it in a useful way.  For example, you can have a script on your web site that takes RSS news feeds from CNN, the BBC, and others and puts them all together in a news ticker on your home page.  You can also have programs such as RSS aggregators, which pull together news items from multiple sites and display them together so that you can browse them quickly and easily.  

I will discuss some other uses of RSS, including the trendiest of them all, Podcasting, later in this article.  (Note from the future: I never actually did that.)  But before that, we need to cover why RSS is useful and separate the fact from the hype.

A brief technical digression

What makes RSS so useful and so widely applicable is that it is a standard format.  It is an application of XML, the eXtensible Markup Language, which is an industry standard markup language for use with structured information.  I won't bore you with a description of XML, but the upshot of this is that RSS files all contain a certain set of standard information which is always marked with the same standard tags.  This means that a program can easily go through the file and pick out particular pieces of information, like the title of a particular news item, without having to pay any attention to what the title actually says or how it is formatted for display.  And because RSS is based on XML, there is already a wide array of programming tools that can be used to create and manipulate the files.

This is in stark contrast to web pages.  Although HTML, the markup language used to build web pages, has a standard set of tags, there is no standard for how a page is structured.  So while there are fixed ways of defining lists, tables, and paragraphs in HTML, there is no agreed upon way to say, "This is a news item, this is its title, and this is the link to its page in the archives."  (Note from the future: With the advent of HTML 5 this is no longer technically true.  However, semantic markup is not universally or consistently applied, so it's still close enough.)  So while a human being can easily look at a page full of items and determine where one ends and the next begins, there is no simple and general way for a computer to do that.  Because everyone is free to pick how they want to denote those things, a program would have to analyze the content of the page and figure out what the author of each page was thinking.  Needless to say, this kind of mind-reading is not something computers are particularly good at.

Getting past the hype

You know what the computing industry is best at producing?  It's not software, hardware, or anything else you can buy in the local office supplies store.  It's hype.  And to really appreciate how good RSS is, you have to get past the hype generated breathless pundits who seem to think it will cure cancer, feed the starving, and bring peace to the world.  (Note from the future: Nobody gives two hoots about RSS or XML anymore.  Hype has a very limited life span.)

From a technical standpoint, there is absolutely nothing revolutionary about RSS.  It's just a standard way of formatting a text file.  You could even create an RSS file in Windows Notepad if you really wanted to.  

And when you think about it, using RSS feeds is just a fancy name for putting a text file on your web site and then letting people download it and mess around with the information it contains.  How is that revolutionary?  We could do that 20 years ago.  

However, it is important to remember that "revolutionary" and "innovative" are not the same as "good."  RSS is good because it provides a standard way of transmitting certain kinds of information in a way that puts all the power in the hands of the consumer, not the publisher.  It's not the technology itself that's revolutionary, but rather the way people have chosen to apply it.

The real reason RSS and the whole "Web 2.0" thing are important is not because of the technology, but because of the paradigm.  That paradigm is: the user is king.  In an era where Hollywood and the music industry are trying to tell you when and where you're allowed to use the music and movies you paid for, open standards put that power in your hands.  (Note from the future: People have forgotten about that aspect, so now "Web 2.0" means "the site uses AJAX."  Also, substitute "Hollywood" for "big tech companies.")

Lauren Weinstein had an interesting post a earlier this year discussing software developers' attitudes toward the elderly.  His main point is that developers tend not to think at all about the issues that older people have when working with computers. These include things like reluctance to or difficulty with learning new programs or ways of working; old hardware which they can't afford to upgrade; isolation and lack of access to help; and physical limitations, such as poor eyesight or reduced manual dexterity.

Of course, this is obviously not true of all developers (like Lauren, for example), but if we apply it to the general zeitgeist of the community, at least as you see it online, then there does seem to be something to this.  As a group, developers are very focused on "the coming thing", as Brisco County Jr. would say.  We all want to be ahead of the curve, working with the cool new technology that's going to take over the world.  We want to be on greenfield projects that are setting the standard for how to do things.  That's why otherwise intelligent programmers do or suggest crazy things like rewriting their conventional LAMP-based site in Go and ReactJS.  Of course, it's long been established that rewriting from scratch is almost always stupid and wasteful, but the fact is that while PHP might pay the bills, it isn't cool.

Of course, it isn't just because they want to be cool that developers like newer technologies.  There are plenty of other reasons.  Intellectual curiosity, for one.  Many of us got into this line of work because we enjoy learning new things, and there are always interesting new technologies coming out to learn.  Learning old things can be interesting as well, but there are a few problems with that:

1. Older technologies are less marketable.  Learning new tech takes a lot of time and effort, and if the tech is already on the way out, the odds of seeing a return on that investment of time, whether financial or just in terms of re-using that knowledge, are significantly lower.
2. Older tech involves more grunt work.  In other words, older programming technologies tend to work at a lower level.  Not always, but the trend is to increasing levels of abstraction.  That means that it will likely take more effort and/or code to do the same thing that you might get more or less for free with newer tech.
3. The problems are less fun.  This particularly applies to things like "supporting Internet Explorer", which Lauren mentions.  When you have to support both the old stuff and the new stuff, you generally have lots of problems with platform-specific quirks, things that are supposed to be compatible but really aren't, and just generally trying to work around limitations of the older tech.  These are the kind of problems that can be difficult, but not in a good way.  They're less like "build a better mousetrap" and more like "find a needle in this haystack".

So, in general, developers aren't usually super enthusiastic about working with or supporting old tech.  It's not really as bad as some people make it sound, but it's not really where most of us want to be.

Another factor is the way websites are developed.  The ideal is that you'd have somebody who is trained and experienced in designing user experiences and who is capable of considering all the use-cases and evaluating the site based on them.  That person could communicate that information to the designers and developers, who could incorporate it into their work and produce sites that are easy to use, compatible with assistive technologies, degrade gracefully when using less capable hardware or software, etc.  The reality is that this rarely happens.  In my experience:

1. Many teams (at least the ones I have experience with) have no UX designer.  If you're lucky, you'll have a graphic designer who has some knowledge or awareness of UX concerns.  More likely, it will be left up to the developers, who are typically not experts.  And if you're very unlucky, you'll have to work with a graphic designer who is fixated on pixel-perfect fidelity to the design and is completely indifferent to the user experience.
2. Most developers are on the young side.  (There are plenty of older developers out there, but the field has been growing for years and the new people coming in are almost all young.)  They're also able-bodied, so they really have any conception of the physical challenges that older people can have.  And it's hard to design for a limitation that you didn't think of and don't really understand.
3. While it's easy in principle, progressive enhancement and graceful degradation can be very tricky to actually pull off.  The main reason is that it's extremely easy to accidentally introduce a change that doesn't play well with some browser, doesn't display properly at some resolution, or what have you.
4. And let's not forget testing.  Even if you can build a site with progressive enhancement, proper accessibility, and attention to the needs of less technical users with little support available, you still need to test it.  And the more considerations, use-cases, and supported configurations you have, the more your testing space expands.  That makes it much harder and more time-consuming to make sure that all these things are actually present and working as intended for all users.

So what am I trying to say here?  I do agree with Lauren that supporting elderly users, disabled users, etc. is an important thing.  It's a thing that, as an industry, we should do.  But it's hard.  And expensive (at least compared to the way most shops work now).  That's not an excuse for not doing it - more like an explanation.

Every shop needs to find a balance between supporting a diversity of users and doing what they need to do within a reasonable budget of time and money.  While it's important to think about security and support new standards, I think that in recent years the industry has probably been a little too quick to abandon old, but still widely used technologies.  If nothing else, we should at least think more about our target user base and whether we're actually serving them or ourselves by introducing $COOL_JS_FRAMEWORK or dropping support for Internet Explorer.  I'm sure that in many (but not all) cases, dropping the old stuff is the right choice, but that shouldn't be the default assumption.

On a lighter note this weekend, here's a "funny because it's true" parody blog entry from earlier this year.  It pretty well sums up the sometimes-rampant insanity in the software industry.  You know, where literally every startup thinks they're Facebook or Google and is going to go from zero to sixty-three quadrillion hits a day, so, well, you have to be ready for that kind of scale on day one.

Of course, approximately 90% of those startups will be out of business in less than five years, but hey, you never know, right?  After all, the entire business model is "get big so you can IPO or get bought out".  Sure, you could try to build a profitable, medium-sized business, but that's basically the same thing as failure.  Besides, if you can attract venture capital, it's not your money you're blowing through anyway, so who cares?

The good news is that the industry seems to be moving away from that mindset a little bit in the last few years.  Or, at least, things seem to be moving more toward business-to-business sales, as opposed mass-market products that have no clear business plan beyond "get huge".  So maybe that's a good sign and this idea of copying every crazy/innovative thing that the big boys are doing will be a thing of the past soon.

Or maybe not.  But I can dream.