JSON Feed
For anyone who&#x27;s tried to write a real-world RSS feed reader, this format does little to solve the big problems the newsfeeds have:<p>* Badly formed XML? Check. There might be badly formed JSON, but I tend to think it&#x27;ll be a lot less likely.<p>* Need to continually poll servers for updates? Miss. Without additions to enable pubsub, or dynamic queries, clients are forced to use HTTP headers to check last updates, then do a delta on the entire feed if there is new or updated content. Also, if you missed 10 updates, and the feed only contains the last 5 items, then you lose information. This is the nature of a document-centric feed meant to be served as a static file. But it&#x27;s 2017 now, and it&#x27;s incredibly rare that a feed isn&#x27;t created dynamically. A new feed spec should incorporate that reality.<p>* Complete understanding of modern content types besides blog posts? Miss. The last time I went through a huge list of feeds for testing, I found there were over 50 commonly used namespaces and over 300 unique fields used. RSS is used for <i>everything</i> from search results to Twitter posts to Podcasts... It&#x27;s hard to describe all the different forms of data it can be contain. The reason for this is because the original RSS spec was so minimal (there&#x27;s like 5 required fields) so everything else has just been bolted on. JSONFeed makes this same mistake.<p>* An understanding that separate but equal isn&#x27;t equal. Miss. The thing that <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;activitystrea.ms" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;activitystrea.ms</a> got right was the realization that copying content into a feed just ends up diluting the original content formatting, so instead it just contains metadata and points to the original source URL rather than trying to contain it. If JSONFeed wanted to really create a successor to RSS, it would spec out how to send along formatting information along with the data. It&#x27;s not impossible - look at what Google did with AMP: They specified a subset of formatting options so that each article can still contain a unique design, but limited the options to increase efficiency and limit bugs&#x2F;chaos.<p>This stuff is just off the top of my head. If you&#x27;re going to make a new feed format in 2017, I&#x27;m sorry but copying what came before it and throwing it into JSON just isn&#x27;t enough.