controlling design in a microcontent browser

I just sent you an email a few hours ago about Awasu, a new RSS client, and then this appeared in your feed :-)

The presentation of each channel can be customized individually. Currently it uses template files but the next version will have support for XSLT. It's a bit of an undocumented feature right now but let me know if you want to give it a go and I'll post the details.

The intent of this was exactly what you alluded to: to enable content providers to customise the presentation of their feeds to match their existing web sites and themes.

Anil, I totally agree about publishing the entire body (or at least USEFUL excerpts) in your RSS feed. This generates more traffic for your site and not less.

I also agree that it would be wonderful to have more control of markup in the RSS feed (perhaps, as you state, by using XSLT). It looks like NetNewsWire at least is headed in the direction of embedding WebCore into their browser window which will give us more realistic rendering.

But I really don't think we really need the full blown site within the RSS aggregator window. Simple text markup, positioning and maybe some colors would be great. Anything further just increases the download time and the bandwidth load to the server.

The web is ultimately about words and RSS is a wonderful way to bring other people's words to my desktop.

And really, site designs don't change that often and when they do, site author's ALWAYS go on about them forever (ahem) so it's not like we (the readers) wouldn't know about it and click through if we were curious...

I dunno. I like how my RSS aggregator (Feedreader), just presents an excerpt (except for Radio Weblogs). It's a great way to quickly scan a large number of blogs and posts - and when I do find something interesting, I can doubleclick on the entry header to see the whole thing in the "native" HTML. Even at broadband speeds, I'm not sure I'd want to be downloading all this extra stuff.

Weird déjà vu, this conflict about who gets to control the presentation, author or reader.

Sounds just like the early battles over HTML, semantic vs. presentational markup. Can any old-timers who participated in that debate offer their views here? Is the situation as parallel as it looks to me?

As a search engine tinkerer, heartfelt thanks to you and everyone else who is including full text in RSS feeds. It makes life so sweet.

Adam, I think it's probably best practice to offer BOTH full and excerpted feeds to satisfy both types of people.

I can certainly see where having excerpts only might be useful, but I generally just find them annoying.

Since multiple conflicting desires exist, perhaps publisher would be better off offering them both. At this point, anyone savvy enough to understand what an RSS feed is will understand the difference between one and the other. Anyone who doesn't will soon.

Also, why not add rss feeds for individual entries? By doing so, people could choose to keep track of comments and trackbacks on individual entries that they're interested in. Much better than re-surfing all over the web to see if someone has responded to your comment on another site.

I'll soon be centralizing a list of all of my RSS feeds and adding excerpt only feeds for those who want them. The main reason I haven't done that yet is because I never write excerpts for my weblog entries. Moveable Type takes the first 20 words by default if no excerpt is available. Often, the only thing less informative than the first 20 words of a post is nothing.

Don't forget the MTEntryMore when you change the MT template, for people who use it.

I know it's redundant by now, having read the comments above, but I completely agree on using MTEntryBody and MTEntryMore in the RSS feed. People who bother to read my site via an RSS reader obviously don't want a piddling little excerpt of my post (though I had it up to quite useful length, then just switched it over entirely - no sense doing it half-cocked). Bravo for suggesting it to a larger crowd.

A styled RSS feed. Interesting, but it opens up a new can of worms. My page has a banner across the top, as do many others. Should that banner appear in every feed? Perhaps an itty-bitty banner instead. OK, so I've got to generate a new stylesheet and muck around with my feed's template to create that. I could include a header graphic right now, if I wanted to, I suppose.

No! No! This can't be allowed to happen! We've tried over and over again to make a version of our sites that are completely open and visible to everyone - standards compliant and accessible. We finally have a different way of doing things that mean that you can read sites in a text-only format and we want to get RID of it!? This is insane! HTML e-mail was a stupid move that fulfilled no function. Newsreaders and RSS should be kept clean and pure and simple. Keep the web for displaying things in a published style. Let Newsreaders be plain text, please!

What Tom said. Why on earth are you intent on attempting to replicate more of a web page's functionality in another tool/format/language? I read things in a newsreader because I only want the *information* and having everything appear in an uniform format makes scanning a large number of sites far easier than battling through all the half-arsed designs out there. If every feed has a different font size, style, positioning etc, I might as well just save a bunch of Mozilla tabs with my favourite sites in. I can see *no* reason for applying styles to RSS feeds.

As for the amount of text in a feed. At Pepysdiary.com I initially put the entire diary entry in the feed, but a couple of people complained because they preferred to have an excerpt. While many people like to read an entire entry in a reader, others don't, and others use the feeds for *syndication*, not reading; just putting up titles of posts and maybe an excerpt on another site. Different needs for different people. Two feeds is a clumsy solution but will displease the least people.

To add one more voice to the naysayers' column:

Yuck. As a reader of RSS feeds, I want control over the style to belong to *me*, not to the originator (or, just as likely, some middleman who'll figure out a way to "brand" the style with spam).

Repeat after me: Heads, Decks and Leads. (Or, to limit ourselves to what RSS does well: Heads, Decks and Links.) That's what is needed in an RSS feed. Grafting the kitchen sink on the side will not serve the cause of aggregation in the long run.

Um, I don't see any reason why reading XSLT couldn't be a preference that you could turn off. Hell, I think showing excerpts or full bodies of the description field should be a setting in the reader, not the feed.

If you want to include the entire body of the posts in your syndication, as well as any design you want -- You could just as well syndicate the html-file to begin with.

Without getting into THAT (RDF/RSS vs. XHTML/cutom XML) debate though, that IS what you're sugesting. It seems to me that the entire idea behind feeds is that people want to know if you've updated or not - without having to open your and 500 other peoples site independantly to check.

Everything beyond that should be up to the user, really - since they're the ones who have to work around your decision to do otherwise.

For those browsing archives, this discussions continues over at Joi's site; this debate has been reawakened.

http://joi.ito.com/archives/2003/12/30/css_in_rss_feed.html