Improving RSS feeds. Her's my response to Dave Winer's post about moving RSS forward.
Generally, I think we should simplify to the maximum and allow for easier, more common use cases.
- JSON feeds. Many many web devs are scared (rightfully or not!) by XML tags. Let's make sure JSON is also a way to go.
- Only a permalink per item. It may sound counter intuitive, but many readers already only care about the permalink and will fetch the related page to extrat title, content, images, authors... etc, using microformats or the HTML itself. Why not then reduce a feed to just a 'list' of links?
- Easing subscriptions for end users. Of coure we came up with SubToMe, but there are obviously more ways, as long as it's as easy to follow a feed on the web than it is to follow someon Twitter or G+!
As someone who wants to use RSS feeds for other things than readers, including processing the contents of the feed, having the text in the feed itself is very important to me. I wouldn't just want the link back to the original story.
(Example : https://github.com/interstar/grabquora )