Embrace the JSON Feed

JSON Feeds have been around since 2017 but the adoption of them hasn't gone far enough. RSS became a thing in 1999, Atom in 2005, and yet those are what most people use to this day. As a front-end engineer, this sucks. Working with XML is a nightmare and drags down my code's efficiency, but I do it because that's the best feed option provided most of the time.

Working with JSON is just so much more straightforward than working with XML. It's easier to make a JSON feed. It's easier to read a JSON feed.

To underline my point to get the latest feed item in XML it would look roughly like this:

import { XMLParser } from 'fast-xml-parser'
const parser = new XMLParser({
  ignoreAttributes: false,
})
const parsedXML = parser.parse(xmlAsString, {})
if (parsedXML?.feed?.entry) {
  // If the feed is Atom
  console.log(parsedXML.feed.entry[0])
} else if (parsedXML?.rss?.channel?.item) {
  // If the feed is RSS
  console.log(parsedXML.rss.channel.item[0])
}

But with JSON Feed it's only:

console.log(myJsonFeed.items[0])

It's time to move on: no new RSS feeds in 2024