2017-06-02
My views on the JSON Feed syndication feed format
When I first read the JSON Feed version 1 specification, I came away feeling frustrated (and expressed it on Twitter) because my initial impression was that the JSON Feed people had not bothered to look at prior art and (painful) prior experiences. Then I read more, including things like Mapping RSS and Atom to JSON Feed, which made it clear that several things that I thought might be accidental omissions were in fact deliberate decisions. Now my current dominant feeling about JSON Feed is quiet sadness.
On a straightforward level I think that the current JSON Feed
specification makes some bad suggestions about id elements (and also). I also think that the
specification is at least loosely written overall, with imprecise
language and important general qualifications that are mentioned
only in one spot. I think that this is a bad idea given how I
expect JSON Feed's specification to be read.
Since people implementing JSON Feed seem to currently be coordinating
with each other, JSON Feed may still avoid potential misunderstandings
and being redefined by implementations.
Stepping beyond issues of how the specification is written, I'm sad that JSON Feed has chosen to drop various things that Atom allows. The thing that specifically matters to me is HTML in feed entry titles, because I use that quite frequently, usually for fonts. Resources like Mapping RSS and Atom to JSON Feed make it plain that this was a deliberate choice in creating the specification. I think that Atom encapsulates a lot of wisdom about what's important and useful in a syndication feed format and it would clearly be useful to have a JSON mapping of that, but that's not what JSON Feed is; it has deliberately chosen to be less than Atom, eliminating some features and some requirements outright.
(The whole thing leaves me with the feeling that JSON Feed is mostly crafted to be the minimum thing that more or less works, both in the actual content of the specification and how it's written. Some people will undoubtedly consider this praise for JSON Feed.)
As you might suspect from this, I have no plans to add JSON Feed generation to DWiki, the wacky Python-based wiki engine behind Wandering Thoughts. Among other issues, DWiki is simply not written in a way that would make generating JSON natively at all an easy process. Adding a JSON Feed is probably reasonably easy in most environments where you assemble your syndication feed as a complete data structure in memory and then serialize it in various formats, because JSON is just another format there (and these days, probably an easy one to serialize to). But for better or worse, DWiki uses a fundamentally different way of building feeds.
Should you provide a JSON Feed version of your syndication feed? I have no opinion either way. Do it if you want to, especially if it's easy. I do hope very much that we don't start seeing things that are JSON-Feed-only, because of course there are a lot of syndication feed consumers out there that certainly don't understand JSON Feed now and may never be updated to understand it.
(But then, maybe syndication feeds are on the way out in general. Certainly there has been rumbles about that in the past, although you couldn't prove it from my Atom feed fetch rates.)