> 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.
Didn't we get enough of this fight 20 years ago? Let's not piss off Dave Winer again. Reminder: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better
> 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
The article is correct. Anyone who knows what they’re doing builds an Atom feed, not RSS. In fact, I thought this was common knowledge a decade ago.
- 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?
The three ways of encoding the string "<xmp>" in the title all look like awful gibberish to me.
Atom is better than RSS in the way Betamax was better than VHS. With the same outcome and consequences for practical use.
As in we now use neither?
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.
Atom is a response to not wanting to support backwards compatibility like RSS does in order to improve things. https://web.archive.org/web/20080216234454/http://www.sixapa... It's explicitly a different thing.
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.