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

Obligatory XKCD

[ttyler]

https://xkcd.com/927/

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.

Oh FFS

[ilsaloving]

I remember when XML was the big thing and everyone was all, "Oooh oooh! Our solution will be so much better if we USE XML!!!11!eleventy"

I also remember then, how stupid this idea was, because there was nothing intrinsic about XML that would improve anything. Sure, XML is a human-readable file format that could be validated against a schema file if you so chose, and that was pretty good, but claiming a file/data format will improve how something functions, is like saying a car will perform better if you put the gas tank on the right side instead of the left.

And here we go, full circle again, except now everyone is ejaculating all over JSON, whose only benefit to XML is that it's slightly less verbose. It has none of the rigour that XML has, but everyone thinks it's great cause it's new and cool, and XML sucks because it's "old".

At least with XML, you can say enforceably say whether the piece of data is malformed or not. With JSON, the best you can do is basic syntax checking. There is no way to enforce the data itself is what it should be.... you have to trust that the other party didn't screw up the contents. The only way to add enforceability is reinvent the wheel in the worst way, by writing your own reference function to validate the data and hope other people use it.