Re: New Feed
  By: Steven Wolf to echicken on Mon Jun 03 2019 13:52:00

 ec>> RSS and Atom are well-defined specs. In that sense they're good

 SW> So RSS feeds are no longer standardized like they were years ago? I think

RSS is as much a standard now as it was years ago.

I think you're using "RSS" as shorthand for "any kind of web-based news feed",
and that's not quite right.  An RSS feed is XML conforming to the RSS format,
so that programs can parse it and find content in predictable places.

Content publishers may publish an RSS feed, or publish their data in some other
format, or publish feeds in multiple formats.  All of these are "feeds", but
not all are RSS.

Anyway, it appears that NPR uses "JSON Feed".  This standard is relatively new
(two years old).  I hadn't heard of it before.  It seems to serve the same
purpose as RSS, but uses JSON instead of XML.  That's great.  My fear was that
various sites were/are just cooking up their own formats and each one would
need special handling.  A "JSON Feed" parser would work with any site that
follows this standard, just as an RSS parser does with RSS.

The name "JSON Feed" is deeply unfortunate, however.  The capital F makes all
the difference.  Any feed of data expressed as JSON is a "JSON feed", but not
every such feed is a "JSON Feed".  The name is a bit too on the nose and they
should've tried harder.

---
echicken
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