JSON Feed Announced As Alternative To RSS (jsonfeed.org)

Reader Anubis IV writes: With Slashdot recently asking whether we still use RSS, it may come as a surprise that something interesting has happened in the world of news feeds this week. JSON Feed was launched as an alternative to RSS and Atom, eschewing the XML they rely on -- which is frequently malformed and difficult to parse -- in favor of a human readable JSON format that reflects the decades of combined experience its authors have in the field. The JSON Feed spec is a simple read that lays out a number of pragmatic benefits the format has over RSS and Atom, such as eliminating duplicate entries, adding the ability to paginate feeds so that old entries remain available, and reducing the need for clients to scrape sites to find images and other resources. Given that it's authored by the developers behind one of the earliest, popular RSS clients and a recently Kickstarted blogging platform, the format is intended to address the common pain points currently faced by developers when producing and parsing feeds.

While it remains to be seen whether JSON Feed will escape the chicken-and-egg stage of adoption, several clients have already added support for the fledging format in the week since its announcement, including Feedbin, Inoreader, and NewsBlur.

Comments

Bad reason

[mi]

eschewing the XML they rely on -- which is frequently malformed and difficult to parse

People making mistakes implementing a spec is not in itself a good reason to drop it. There will be malformed JSON, that's to be sure. Do you escape slashes? Are true and false quoted? How long can a number be? Do the numbers use decimal dot or decimal comma — or does it depend on the locale? And, in the latter case, the server's locale or the client's?

I agree, that JSON is easier to read than XML, but not easier enough to change the standard now.

Obvious solution

[mwvdlee]

Problem: XML is harder to write than JSON.
Proposed solution A: Invent an entirely new format based on JSON and have the entire world adopt it.
Proposed solution B: Write a small library that translates JSON to XML and just use any of the dozens of libraries that already exists to parse RSS feeds.
Let's go for solution A.

Harder to malform the JSON

[SuperKendall]

People making mistakes implementing a spec is not in itself a good reason to drop it.

It is when the mistakes are frequent enough, obviously implementing RSS feeds is rather hard and most sites are really poor at it.

Adding to that is the simple fact that very few server languages have really easy or good XML generation at this point, compared to JSON library support. There are lots more good JSON libraries around and people are more comfortable with them and used to how they work.

There will be malformed JSON, that's to be sure.

Why, when most JSON will be produced by a library that simply maps something out to JSON? Also it's super easy to check JSON validity. If you ask 100 developers today to produce a defined output in JSON and XML, which do you think will have a much higher percentage chance of being correct?

Do you escape slashes? Are true and false quoted? How long can a number be? Do the numbers use decimal dot or decimal comma â" or does it depend on the locale?

Why do you think any of that matters? If the JSON is valid it is valid. Everyone on earth and most libraries are used to accommodating JSON that may have true or false either as boolean values or as strings for example. It simply doesn't matter.

I agree, that JSON is easier to read than XML, but not easier enough

It's WAY easier to generate in a world of developers that uses mostly JSON now and hardly touches XML. That alone is a HUGE reason to switch. Why saddle every website on earth with legacy crap? It's probably a big part of the reason RSS is not as common anymore, and the real crime would be if most sites had nothing like RSS at all...

Re:Harder to malform the JSON

[gnunick]

The only coders using JSON now are java coders. They made a mistake selecting their flat file, hierarchical data format. Should have just build a good XML library in java to start.

Point of order: I've read several messages in this thread where you misassociate JSON with Java, but JSON didn't come from Java.

Its source is right there in the name: Javascript Object Notation.

Now on to subjective matters: XML is a disgusting standard which should die a fiery death. And I say this as someone who works with XML on a daily basis (but more and more JSON these days, thankfully). The fact that good libraries exist to work with it doesn't make it any more palatable to me. JSON is vastly simpler, maps easily to the most common data types, and is (get this...) usually easy (for humans) to read.

Java and XML were stuck together at an early age, and their forced marriage was unfortunately very fecund... but even many Java developers have seen fit to move on, if they're lucky enough to have the chance.

Podcasts would be the adoption moment I think.

[thewolfkin]

Since the death of Google Reader my most used case of RSS is podcasts. I get the occasional feed notification from IFTTT but most of the websites I used to get RSS from just have direct channels that are a little better and a little easier.

But podcasts however I listen to a fair number of podcasts and I have about 30-40 of them in my reader (Podcast Addict). I'd like a readable JSON format for syndication but if it's going to mess with my podcasts I won't bother.