RSS vs email (was Re: Simple website for hosting mercurial repositories.)

[Marcin Kasperski]

>> I thought about this, but I figured people are moving to
>> syndication feeds for notification instead of emails.  Maybe not?
>> (It wouldn't take much to add.)
>
> 'people' over the age of 30 are not really :) (in my experience)

Well, I am over 30 and I really like RSS and use it if possible.
The main problem is that the content of syndication feeds is
in maaaaaaany cases incredibly bad.

For the simple example compare the feed generated by the Mercurial
wiki to emails generated by the same wiki.

Email:
- title like 'Update of "ConvertExtension" by Marcin.Kaspesrki"'
- email starts with the link to the changed page
- the rest of email contains pretty, readable diff of the change made

RSS:
- title like "ConvertExtension"
- body contains only the user comment (or is empty if not given)
- the only link leads to the diff page, there is no link to the actual page

So while reading email I get full information which page was changed,
by whom, and which changes were made, plus I am one click from reading
the current page body. While reading RSS I get information
which page was changed, I must click once to view what were the changes
and who made them, and click again to see the current content.