Andreas Haugstrup Pedersen | solitude.dk

…and the Max Power way. As Homer Simpson beautifully put it:

Homer:

There are three ways to do things: the right way, the wrong way, and the Max Power way!

Bart:

Isn't that just the wrong way?

Homer:

Yeah, but faster!

Eric Rice notices that his syndication traffic has surpassed his normal traffic and notes:

Right now, Steve Gillmor is reading this and smirking at me. He believes the HTML page model is, or will be, dead. I'm not totally opposed to all aspects of that idea, however it seems to me that to get the same user experience to show up in RSS feeds, feed programs need to become browser v.2.... so are we just rebuillding the web?

And he is right. Not only would you be reinventing HTML, you would be doing it worse than Max Power. It would be the wrong way, but slower. And let me tell you this: Solving a problem worse than Homer Simpson is a pretty awful way of solving an idea.

No matter how deep into the RSS can do friggin' anything camp you are, you have to admit that HTML handles hypertext a truckload better than RSS will ever do. That's because HTML was designed to handle hypertext and RSS was designed to handle syndication of said hypertext. HTML has had over 10 years to develope a markup language to handle hypertext, RSS has spent exactly zero seconds trying to solve the issue of handling hypertext (it handles syndication pretty well though).

For RSS to replace HTML it would need to become HTML, with added syndication features. That's solving the problem the wrong way slowly (why the hell would you ever want to reinvent HTML from scratch like that). It's making a relatively simple problem very complex — just like American voting machines.

I already have a seamless integration between the syndication (RSS) and content (HTML) working quite nicely. RSS is integrated into my webrowser so I don't notice when I switch from RSS to HTML and back. If the problem is that you want the content show up in it's glory look at the permalink and load the damn page automatically.

With that said there's one more simple reason that RSS can't replace HTML. You can't archive RSS very well (or at all). How do you link to an item in a feed? Oh, right — you can't. How's that for killing conversations on the web. Even if you could link to an item the item would disappear once the item is pushed off the end of the feed.

Are you going to say that you'll just split the items into different files and save them where people can link to them? Maybe you'll also add the ability to link and quote. Congratulations, you just re-inveted HTML with different element names. You all can take your RSS-can-do-anything statements and shove them up your… Think before acting, people. What would be easier? Adding syndication features to HTML (like RSS is doing currently) or adding all of HTML to RSS? Yes, that's a rhetorical question.