feed file

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A feed file is a feed represented as a side file (a separate file, as opposed to part of an existing HTML page, like a homepage), typically in a custom feed-specific format (often XML like RSS/Atom, or JSON like ActivityStreams 2.0 or JSON Feed). Feed files are side files that may complement marking up composite streams already visible on HTML pages, e.g. with h-entry and optionally h-feed.

Feed File Formats

A brief list of feed file formats, by recency (most recently updated/improved), and how to contribute to them:

JSON Feed - contribute via its GitHub issues
ActivityStreams2 - 2017 W3C Recommendation, contribute via its GitHub issues
ActivityStreams - IETF draft - abandoned
Atom - contribute via IETF
RSS 2.0 (need link to canonical spec) - ???
RSS 1.0 W3C Recommendation (need link to canonical spec) - frozen at W3C, errata via???
RSS 0.92 (need link to canonical spec) - possibly obsoleted/superseded by RSS 2.0

Criticism

Feed files, being separate from actual viewable content on a website, suffer from several problems like:

DRY Violations

Main article: DRY

As a duplicate of information already in the HTML of a web page, feed files are an example of the usual DRY violations.

Maintenance

Higher maintenance (requiring a separate URL, separate code path to generate, separate format understanding)

Out of date

Feed files become out of date with the visible HTML page (often because of broken separate code path), e.g.:

2015-02-03: 50 days out of date: http://indiewebcamp.com/irc/2015-02-03#t1422988681803
2015-04-26 (reported) :
my RSS failed once for 3 weeks even though I generated it from the same database, because I changed the name of a field! Updated HTML templates but forgot the feed templates, since invisible
[1]

Inefficient Representation

Inefficient representation (XML feeds tend to be "wordier" and require more elements, duplication of data, artificial precision in datetimes, etc. all of which add up to higher bandwidth costs etc.)

Example:

Tantek Çelik h-feed at http://tantek.com/ has latest posts with full text contents which is smaller (uses less bandwidth) than the feed file at http://tantek.com/updates.atom (due to reasons noted). This is typical for full content h-feeds vs feed files, and thus typically relegates feed files both unnecessary and inefficient.

Inefficient counter-argument

Comparing a full-text feed-file vs. summary-text h-feed, the full-text feed-file is more efficient to retrieve. Details:

Comparision of required bandwidth: Atom feed vs. h-feed size

If feed readers can retrieve a single file that contains all the latest posts with their full text contents, that requires less network traffic than retrieving every permalink page.

Some feed files and h-feeds only have summaries, and thus require all linked entry/item URLs if they want to provide the same user experience (displaying full content and not only headlines).

Previously: The old Monocle would retrieve all linked entry/item URLs until it was closed in 2016.

No Archives

no access or discovery of archives

No Since Support

no way of getting content since a particular datetime