[Sigia-l] web site design vs RSS

[Nick Hansen]

On Oct 18, 2007, at 8:17 PM, Ziya Oz wrote:

> So ya think this Internets thang ("Trying to control how a user  
> consumes
> this information by forcing elements of presentation") is a joke on a
> billion users?

I take your "this Internets thang" to mean the WWW.  HTML does not  
denote presentation.  It is a way to describe the elements of a  
document so that the document can be consumed in a meaningful way.   
CSS is a way to describe how the author/designer would like the  
document to be rendered in a particular medium.  So, no.  Not a  
joke.  And this whole "Internets thang" is much larger than the WWW,  
many facets of which have absolutely no meaning in a presentational  
context.  RSS being one such technology/service/protocol/what-have-you.

RSS was intended to divorce content from the presentational context  
entirely.  Bringing all of the presentational aspects in to the  
standard muddies its purpose.  From my perspective, it is like using  
Excel to build a relational database.  Sure, it can be done, but  
there are better suited tools that will afford you a great deal more  
flexibility and performance.

>
> If you think through this problem just a tiny bit, you can see that  
> the CSS
> necessary for the presentation part can in fact be ignored by the  
> client
> feed reader (and be substituted locally, you know, just as on the  
> Internets)
> if so chosen. The protocol can also include a single bit to signal  
> if the
> CSS should be retrieved at all or not. This is a no-brainer.

But now you're essentially browsing the web and there's a whole  
complement of tools that already exist and have been extensively  
tested which are available to you.  And in this medium I can do the  
very same thing.  In fact I often do.  Lynx gets me to the  
information quicker and with less frippery than most of the over- 
designed sites out there.

Why saddle RSS with the same feature set?  And this comes from  
someone who built an entire blogging application based on RSS 1.0.

-Nick