Re: ATOM feeds

[Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com>]

On Thu, 14 Jan 2010 09:49:45 +0800 jidanni@jidanni.org wrote: 

j> http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/61026 says
j> "every feed reader in the universe supports both. Their functionality is
j> essentially identical."

j> Every feed reader, except the one in emacs/gnus.

This is not entirely accurate.  Both RSS and ATOM have many versions and
I've seen many feed readers that don't interpret every version
correctly.  Gnus does not intend to be a feed reader: nnrss is obviously
bolted on, not well-integrated like the rest of the backends.  I don't
claim this is a good state of affairs, but that's where we are.

j> http://ehp03.niehs.nih.gov/article/feed is ATOM with no RSS available

TZ> On my TODO list is integration with Google Reader and other aggregators.
TZ> I think nnrss is not as useful as an aggregator for most cases, and
TZ> maintaining it in the face of the many broken ATOM and RSS
TZ> implementations is a challenge.

j> Are you saying that I will have to deal with GOOGLE.COM to read RSS/ATOM
j> in the future gnus?

I didn't say that.  I think feed aggregators are a valuable service and
Google Reader is one which I find particularly nice.  The aggregator
support in Gnus should be flexible enough to handle other aggregator
services, including ones the user chooses to provide.

Writing and maintaining a feed aggregator is a massive undertaking.
Most of the effort goes not into code but into database management and
user support.  I'd rather let other organizations worry about this than
try to provide it inside Gnus, as nnrss.el essentially tries to do.

Note I don't speak for the Gnus project.  This is just my view and I
haven't written a line of code to back up my opinions.  I am also aware
that the FSF may not want to explicitly support GMail in the Gnus
manual, so Google Reader will probably also come under scrutiny.  I
personally don't believe that using external services is in itself a
loss of freedom but the FSF's position will probably be more relevant to
this discussion.

Ted