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A comment on RSS Rant. Parent comment

Re:RSS Rant by generalk on Friday October 28, 2011 @11:20AM (#3168613) 

  > The web has no default client.
Every computer comes with a browser. Back in the dark days, ISPs geared towards new users were full-on content providers ala AOL.

  > Email has no default client.
Again, either your ISP sets it up for you, you're using your OS's built-in (Windows Mail, Mail.app) or you're using GMail or similar.

  > TV has no default client.
Sure it does, it's baked into every television set ever sold, and it's started when you turn the set on.

  > SMS has no default client.
Again, buy a phone and it's got an "SMS client." Receive SMS, phone alerts you, you can respond.

However, RSS has no default client. If you see a link that says "contact us via email" and you click it, your mail client responds to the mailto: link. There should absolutely be an rss:// (or whatever) protocol link that browsers can either handle internally or ship to whatever client.

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Re:RSS Rant by mapgrep on Friday October 28, 2011 @07:14PM (#3170473)
>Every computer comes with a browser.

There was a time when this was not true. No computers came with browser. Then the web got really, really popular. Browsers were added after the fact.

Even today, the share of non bundled web browsers matches that of bundled web browsers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_Web_browsers

Bundling is nice. RSS should be bundled! But it's a red herring to say the lack of bundling, or the fact that it's got multiple vendors, is why RSS has not succeeded enough.

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