Also use it every day, but there is something to be said about the issues with it, mainly that it’s invisible to most people. It’s very much a techie thing and I think the only reason it’s still around is because it’s default in a lot of site software. It’d be interesting to see what kind of engagement larger news organizations get from RSS links.
that's a really general statement but I'm going to bite. Tech need not be up front and in everybody's face. I think HTTP is the same. It seems reasonable that most people don't know or care what http is or what it's doing at the beginning of urls. Or why it sometimes has an 's' on the end. And I'm even more confident saying that 'most people' don't know about how amazing TCP over IP is.
I'd like RSS/feeds of strongly typed content to be more invisible and prevalent. We're living in the HTML dark ages here.
This is a very odd comparison and I think a straw man, unless you just misunderstand. Everything you mention is internal plumbing, so of course people don’t need to care about it, by design. HTTP however does have a very “in your face” interface, which are the hypertext links themselves. People know the system exists because it is actually right there in their face. In RSS, maybe the xml is the plumbing, but there’s no clear and obvious way to access it, so much so that most people wouldn’t even know it exists. It’s hard to build and justify a system if a majority of people have no idea about it.
