> I have never had this problem. Do you have any example feeds you encounter this with? Are you sure its not just a bug in your reader? I mean, it's hard to sa

> I have never had this problem. Do you have any example feeds you encounter this with? Are you sure its not just a bug in your reader? I mean, it's hard to say whether it's a bug in my reader, given that the RSS spec makes no mention of how relative links should work. I've variously used Newsbeuter, Newsboat, Newsblur, and The Old Reader and have never not had this problem. (Edit: an example from this morning: Newsblur didn't know what to do with the footnote links in Dan Luu's blog [https://danluu.com/atom.xml https://danluu.com/atom.xml]. Aside: Newsblur seems to be responding with 500s for about every other request today. sigh isn't technology wonderful?) > Having RSS completely static means that hosting an RSS feed is super simple and does not require the increased attack potential of a dynamic service - something that the current federated web protocols completely fail at. Pagination would work fine with static hosting. And "updates-since" requests wouldn't preclude static hosts from ignoring them and working exactly how they work now. I agree with you about federated web protocols though - I'm pretty bummed ActivityPub requires an inbox, otherwise I think it would pretty much work with static hosting. > I don't think creating a separate RSS-only web of links makes sense. You're right, it doesn't really make sense. I think the crux of my frustration there is that we've got a syndication system that's bolted on top of the web, rather than properly integrated. It's probably the best that can be done though, without an entire separate hypertext system. > Lots? Really? iframes are more dead than RSS, at least for anything outside of ads. Youtube and Vimeo embeds are mostly where I see them. >> or content that only makes sense with JS enabled > Limiting RSS to static mostly-text content provides a lot of consistency. I'm not complaining that feed items can't execute Javascript; I'm annoyed that sometimes the (textual) content of the post refers directly to other content that's only there after JS adds it. (I'm not blaming authors, this is just a problem of the content being written for a webpage and then being included in a different context. Again, an issue of the syndication system having been bolted onto the web.) > Ugly, yes, but how is this a problem in practice? Just because it's not as hip as JSON? No, I don't particularly love JSON either. XML does indeed work okay, but I pretty regularly (a couple times a year, maybe?) see broken feeds because of mis-escaped content. I think one of the feed generators of someone I follow produces bad CDATA tags too. Pretty hard to mess up JSON escaping (as much as HTML-in-JSON makes me shudder).