qwghlm.co.uk : because all the other domain names were taken

Why does everything have to be converted to RSS these days? The latest suggestion is bank statements and bills should be delivered via RSS.

I don’t think this is in any way a good idea. Let’s say I want to have my itemised phone bill via RSS. Each line is an RSS <item>, and each has a <description>. In this description, it has to tell me the time of call, its duration, what number it was dialled to and the total cost. But RSS’s structure cannot really handle this, so we’ll just have to combine them all together inside the <description>…</description> tags, separated by say, spaces.

Fine, us humans can read it. But the real point of markup schemae like RSS is so that machines can parse them more easily. Say I want to transfer the data into an accounting or spreadsheet application. As we’ve arbitrarily piled all the data together inside the item description, we have to write something to parse that data out again. Which is stupid.

We could come up with an XML namespace for bills or statements that is standardised and easier to parse (or even just provide the data in CSV format), and add it in as an extension to the RSS feed. But then why bother having the RSS there in the first place? The only reason we have it is so we as humans can read it in an RSS reader. But we could equally access a human-readable version in good old HTML using a web browser (an equally valid ‘opt-in’ technology).

This would be OK, if the disadvantages of the above were somehow outweighed by the advantages of RSS. But none of them really help. Take automated aggregation – which is damn handy for blogs and news services. What possible use is aggregating your itemised phone bill and bank statement together? Or for that matter, aggregating your current account and credit card statements? They are perfectly fine on their own – individual items on a statement are only relevant in the context of that statement. Combining two or more statements would only make them more confusing. Other features of RSS, like providing per-entry permalinks or links to comment pages, are absolutely useless for financial data.

By RSSifying a statement or bill, we remove the markup that is useful (i.e. that which keeps cost entities and descriptive entities in separate columns), and the markup that is added has very little real-world use. By all means explore the potential of RSS, but any ideas for it should be ultimately in some way more useful than before.