so my friend asked me to explain whats an rss feed

RSS is what we had before algorithms that just pick adverts and far right fuckery.
- Legit we should go back

I am so old that I worked with SGML. Compared to that, XML is a lovely language. And sometimes I still miss writing XSLT to quickly transform some XML documents. These days you can do similar things with JSON, of course. But it's not as easy and standardized as the XML tooling.

Reddit support to the rescue..

Json is superior and thats a hill im willing to die on
- That's silly, if Json was superior the web would be using HTJson, not HTML.
  
  Most of the data driven web already does. Whats the fediverse run on?
  
  it is HTJS now
- (YAML has entered the fight!)
  (Edit: incidentally, I'm not saying YAML is the best. JSON is possibly the one I hate thr least. But I do hate them all!)
  
  All JSON is valid YAML
  
  Norway

XML is a superior format to Json or yaml or any of those other trendy formats around today. It's the hill I'm willing to die on because I'm right.
- XML aims to be both human-readable and machine-readable, but manages neither. It's only really worth it if you actually need the complexity or extensibility, otherwise it's just a major pain to map XML structures to any sensible type representation. I've been forced to work with some of the protocols that people like to present as examples of good XML usage and I hate every single one of them.
  Fuck YAML though. That spec is longer and more complex than any other markup language I know of and it doesn't have a single fully compliant implementation.
  
  Ye, we like to use toml for configuration files etc.
  
  I'm okay with the "human-readability," but I've never been happy with the "machine-readibility" of XML. Usually I just want to pull a few values from an API return, yet every XML library assumes I want the entire file in a data structure that I can iterate through. It's a waste of resources and a pain in the ass.
  Even though it's not the "right" way, most of the time I just use regex to grab whatever exists between an opening and closing tag. If I'm saving/loading data from my own software, I just use a serialization library.
  
  Yeah, I remember when I was trying to parse XML into some lua tables and it forever stumped me how to represent something like
  xml
  
  <thing important_param=10 other_param="abracadabra"> stuff </thing>
  You just have to have different ways to turn different tags into stuff in your program and that's a huge amount of overhead to think about when all I want is a hash map and maybe an array.
- What's better about it?
  
  It makes you want to die on a hill
  
  From my point of view : it has a hudge ecosystem with tons of robust libraries. This does not make it perfect, but for an industrial point of view, you don't look for new shiny clean things. (My point of view is 15 years old yet...)
- I can only assume you've never tried to parse or read XML.
- JSON, which has been around since 01, is trendy?
  
  Something being "old" is totally unrelated to whether it's trendy. See: virtually every food and fashion trend.
- Uh-huh... ever tried to integrate with a poorly implement WCF service? Like communication from a Java service to a dotnet service through a WSDL?
  I'll take a json API over XML any day
  
  I’m not sure that’s the fault of XML though.
  It’s more the fault of the implementation and documentation.
  We have a WCF service with an odd configuration and nobody has been able to integrate with it that didn’t use Microsoft tools. It’s definitely not XML’s fault.
  (That service has been replaced with a REST API now)
- As someone who works with both, readability is the utmost important thing for me, and XML is cumbersome and has more characters to sift through to find what I'm lookin for.
- I don't miss XML, but at least it has support for comments. On the other hand, I wish whitespace in XML wasn't significant. JSON needs to die in favor of JSON 5.
- Nah, XML is just a slightly older fad. Let's go back to S Expressions. They've been in use for over 60 years and have significantly better readability.

This seems like a weird answer to the question, though.
- imo, it's fake as it's a "wate of time"

Lol this is actually true.

I’m struggling with it right now

Wow, a wate of time, he even left out the 's' to save time. This is how you know he's a good programmer, others never bother to optimize unneeded characters out of their comments.