RSS is undead
&gt; RSS died. Whether you blame Feedburner, or Google Reader, or Digg Reader last month, or any number of other product failures over the years, the humble protocol has managed to keep on trudging along despite all evidence that it is dead, dead, dead.<p>What a stupid thing to say... All this indicates is that RSS users didn&#x27;t like those apps.  I use elfeed, which has upwards of 500 stars on Github, and it&#x27;s an <i>Emacs</i> feed reader.  Many other feedreaders exist that you can run on your computer.  Furthermore, Feedly and NewsBlur, along with other services, seem to be quite lively.  My rather unknown blog gets some requests referred from the Flipboard app regularly.<p>But a fact is that lots of incompetent site makers do not add RSS feeds to the websites they build.  My uni&#x27;s RSS feeds are going offline one by one as they redesign the web pages, and I have to maintain a scraper script to follow the updates.  Many institutions&#x27; feeds are badly curated, e.g. a museum I follow, I figured out today that I wasn&#x27;t getting any news because their RSS feed had a &lt;!doctype html&gt; and some conditional comments before the actual feed.  Some feeds include javascript and XML readers fail on them.  And then there&#x27;s the Wix or Squarespace or whatnot websites, and they are a total failure (especially because they can&#x27;t do this RSS thing whereas even Tumblr does it easily).<p>I really believe we should somehow certificate programmers and some certain specialisations.  That means ensuring that a &quot;web developer&quot; does know about the base specifications on which the web is built, and the most common best practices.  If a web dev fails at making an RSS feed, that&#x27;s a <i>big</i> problem.