/dev/zero

Now that’s just not playing fair.

Does Youtube simply not grasp RSS?

Viewing any RSS enabled web site in Firefox or Konquerer, I get a little button in my browser that allows me to add that RSS feed directly to my RSS agregator. In Firefox, this defaults to it’s own “Livemarks” system, in Konquerer the default is the Kontact/Akregator application, but both have a mechanism to define another reader.

Click on this little button when viewing any page on Youtube and you get… a broken RSS feed.
In Firefox it takes you to, not the RSS feed, but a page EXPLAINING HOW TO GET THE RSS FEED. If I need an explanation I would look for a link ON the page that says “about our RSS feeds” or something similar. If I click the “subscribe” button, which is generated by the “link rel=’alternate’ type=’application/rss+xml’”, I expect I’ll get an RSS feed, not human-readable page ABOUT rss feeds.

On top of this, they don’t offer a feed of something simple like, say, all of my “subscribed” channels. No, I can get a feed of MY vides (videos I’ve uploaded. Useless to me since I don’t upload videos. I’m a consumer, not a producor.), all new videos (The last thing I want is an RSS feed of every new video posted to Youtube), etc.
Even viewing the page for one of my subscriptions, there’s no link to subscribe to the RSS feed. Sure, the “about” page tells me what URL syntax to put in my RSS reader to GET that page, but why don’t they just put the simple header IN the html page so I can use the tools just about every browser provides to subscribe to the RSS?

Apparently for Youtube, Really Simple Syndication means “you do the work”.