I'm looking at discussing the current limitations, when RSS works and when it doesn't. More importantly how would you design a better (more powerful) system today - while maintaining the decentralised ethos of RSS.
I'd build it somewhere in between what it is now and Usenet. One of the biggest benefits of RSS is how easy it is to publish content. Two of the biggest downsides is the lack of interactivity and the lack of discoverability. What if all of the rss readers spoke to each other? What if you could see which feeds people were reading? What if you could add a comment to a particular post and have a discussion with other people who are reading it? What if you could be notified of updates to certain conversations the same way you're notified of updates to your feeds? A killfile will solve the issue of not seeing unwanted content or people. Maybe go with a federated model instead of peer to peer, so that the servers could scrape the internet for RSS content. That way discoverability isn't just limited to what you and your friends are already reading. Maybe use Cap'n Proto as the app-to-app wire protocol instead of http for real-time updates.<p>> Decouple it a bit more from html<p>Is that really possible? I've considered it quite a lot in the past few years, but I can never get past the fact that it has become the universal markup language. Even markdown converts to HTML before displaying (so it can by styled with CSS).
Decouple it a bit more from html, too many RSS feeds contain html description/title fields. It's annoying both when you're showing them in a html page and when you're showing them in a native application.
RSS is a piece of shit. <<a href="http://web.archive.org/web/2004/http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/02/04/incompatible-rss>" rel="nofollow">http://web.archive.org/web/2004/http://diveintomark.org/arch...</a><p>Atom was invented as a replacement because nothing could be salvaged from the multitude of original RSS specifications. See RFCs 4287 and 5023.
It would be nice to be able to declare endpoints for structured responses to items. I'd like to be able to thumbs up/down or rate articles in a client and have it go back to the publisher in addition to helping me customize what I read.