[Sigia-l] web site design vs RSS

[Eric Scheid]

On 19/10/07 12:35 PM, "Ziya Oz" <listera at earthlink.net> wrote:

>> one problem is that many readers use the style of many feeds aggregated into
>> one page ... and you now have conflicting style sheets competing to control
>> the page.
> 
> I'm going to outsource the repeated posting of this for people hard of
> reading here:
> 
>>> 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.
> 
> User. Choice. Voluntary. Simple.

OK, so the user says they want to see the CSS for feed #1, and they say they
want to see the CSS for feed #2 (and not the CSS for feed #3) ... and their
feed reader of choice (yay! user, choice, voluntary simple!) displays the
daily news in the "river of news" model, which for the readers not familiar
with it is where multiple entries are arranged down the page, blog style,
but those entries are from different blogs, all interleaved simply by time.
Content wise, it would be like this:
<http://twitter.com/darthvader/with_friends>

Now, imagine they choose to see the CSS for each entry per the source CSS.
Simple binary choice to turn on/off the CSS for each source, but seriously
more difficult to implement: CSS for source #1 has "p {font-family:
tahoma;}", CSS for source #2 has "p {font-family: courier;}", the page
contains <p/> elements from both sources ... now the dev has to parse (and
second guess broken syntax) and munge the CSS and the html such that the
appropriate rules apply only to the appropriate entries.

Any fool can specify an on/off switch.

Perhaps you should be the one doing the deeper reading.

e.