Re:Why RSS sucks (Score 1)

If there were apps for NNTP to do what RSS apps do with RSS feeds, then the "logging in to usenet" would be as invisible as "fetching the RSS feed". When using NNTP you would need a NNTP library, for RSS you just need HTTP support. The provider just puts the file on his apache, and the client just needs to send an HTTP request. And no firewall problems whatsoever. Simple. I don't see the "complexity" in XML here. RSS is actually really simple to parse. I don't know the NNTP protocol in detail, but I doubt it's simpler. Well, there is the mess with different syndication formats - but that has nothing to do with the basic concept or XML in general. An alternative to a static RSS feed that gets updated with every new article would be an RSS feed that you access with a HTTP query with parameter to tell it when you last checked. That way the server could give you a list of all new articles dynamically, even though it'd be slighly less efficient. That would be useful, yes. a) Users would not miss items a) It would reduce traffic for providers when people fetch a feed regularily, as the feed would only contain the new items