12 ms·

The real responsive design challenge is RSS

221 points by begriffs 10y ago

dave2000 10y ago
RSS is odd. Unloved by many, killed by Google, but there's still no better way of getting notified that a rarely (or perhaps not so rarely if you have endless time to read "internet stuff") updated site has something new to read. So I have an Android app which checks once per day and if there's anything new that day (I can go days or weeks without an update) I then pass it on to my Pocket account. Sometimes it goes another step further and I send it on to my Kindle. Perhaps there's a better way of handling this. I can't read it directly on my Kindle because the browser there - optimistically described "experimental" - is shocking. Pocket is great because it does a good job of producing a page which consists of just the typing without the usual horrific web fluff (although sometimes it gets it wrong and the graphics go missing). It seems a shame that, when most of what I'm interested in started life as someone else essentially entering text into a document, there's no way of obtaining it in that form but instead it has to be manipulated into something sensible. I don't want an "experience"; I just want to read what you've typed. Would it help if I gave you my email address?
- exolymph 10y ago
  I think your last line is tongue-in-cheek, but it's actually my preferred approach. > still no better way of getting notified that a rarely (or perhaps not so rarely if you have endless time to read "internet stuff") updated site has something new to read. Maybe it's because I became a heavy web user after RSS was already on its way out (of the mainstream), but my favorite way to be notified is an email newsletter. I don't care very much about the frequency because I save everything to Instapaper anyway and read it weeks later.
- iMiiTH 10y ago
  It would be fantastic if there was a standard format like you suggested, it would also make the web a whole lot more accessible.
  - ktRolster 10y ago
    "Marc Andreessen" suggested something like that at the bottom of this: http://www.zerobugsandprogramfaster.net/essays/2.html http://www.zerobugsandprogramfaster.net/essays/2.html (search for "separate content from presentation")
    - dave2000 10y ago
      I thought the whole point of css was to separate content from presentation. But it only seems to be used for reskinning sites and - occasionally - for producing a "printer view". I suppose I could pretend to be a printer. But can I not instead just pretend to want to read the text?
  - wtbob 10y ago
    > It would be fantastic if there was a standard format like you suggested I thought that's what HTML was supposed to be … Somehow it turned into a portable runtime instead.
- wtbob 10y ago
  > I don't want an "experience"; I just want to read what you've typed. Exactly. That's why I prefer command-line browsers (and like reader mode): I just want to see words, not distraction.
- atom058 10y ago
  Regarding reading news on the Kindle: I've noticed that the browser becomes much more responsive (read: usable) if one disables JavaScript altogether. Sure, some websites will break, but most will work well enough to be able to read articles. Disabling JavaScript is also my trick for actually being able to browse the internet on a phone these days. In Firefox for Android, you can install a plugin to toggle it on/off for when you need it. A bit sad that you have to do this to get at decent experience, but what can you do...
mmahemoff 10y ago
As the developer of an RSS parser, I spend a lot of time hitting View Source, surprisingly often on pages that appear empty in Chrome. In a more general sense than RSS, I also have to install extensions to format JSON. Considering how much browsers are targeting developers these days, might they consider rendering JSON, XML, etc in some standard way that is useful to developers (as an option at least). I am talking about syntax highlighting as well as some basic interactive features like expanding/collapsing.
- azernik 10y ago
  As far as I know Firefox does this for XML; haven't tried it lately, so I don't know if it behaves similarly for JSON (I know Chrome doesn't).
  - bzbarsky 10y ago
    Firefox nightly and developer edition show JSON loaded directly in a tab (i.e. not in a subframe) in a nice JSON viewer), and have for a while now. Release Firefox does not, for various reasons (including the fact that the current JSON viewer implementation actually changes the DOM of the page involved, which is technically an HTML spec violation).
- chrisrhoden 10y ago
  If there are no style parser directives, chrome will render the XML very nicely by default, in my experience. As the developer of an RSS parser
exolymph 10y ago
It depends on who your audience is, right? If most of the people who read your site come from social media on their phones instead of reading via RSS, optimizing for RSS readability is an activity with rapidly diminishing returns.
- slyall 10y ago
  but how did your article get onto social media? Was it one of the 20 people who read your RSS feed and linked to it on twitter and elsewhere? Been there, done that, got the Hackernews Karma. But if you want to optomise for casual readers vs people who want to actively subscribe to your content...
toyg 10y ago
Hey, a post about RSS content quirks! It makes me feel young again! On a more serious note - RSS is the Great Web Leveller. It spites your fancy CSS hacks, it's disgusted by your insane javascript, and it will piss all over your "mobile-optimized" crap. No semantic markup == no party; because markup is for robots, and RSS parsers are very stubborn robots that can see through web-hipster bullshit like Superman through walls. The only real sin of RSS (beyond the holy wars and format bikeshedding and committee madness and and and...) is that it's too honest a format. It's a format for stuff that matters, for content that deserves to be read; it's too pure to survive in a world of content silos, stalking analytics and inaccessible material-designs. Its innocence doomed it in a very poetic way.
- usaphp 10y ago
  > "web-hipster bullshit" Why so much negativity lately regarding new trends in the web?
  - bordercases 10y ago
    I can voice my perspective. Essentially: bike-shedding, bedazzlement, and bloat.
  - gue5t 10y ago
    Because continued development of the Web is an obvious, user-hostile money-grab. If you only care about getting your software to users, you have a million choices for your application runtime. If you want to monetize every user by selling their privacy or headspace, you have only one: i.e., "pirating" Facebook is a logical impossibility. Communicative efficacy on the Web has not improved since the early 1990s--Javascript and its ilk have virtually no positive effect on the usefulness of Wikipedia, for example. We're converting what was intended to be a transport for communication into a framework for writing portable software. The thesis here is that there should be a digital way to share hypertext articles and other statically-described communication without pay the costs (privacy, rendering efficiency, security bugs, transport performance and uncacheability, accessibility) associated with a cross-platform sandboxed multimedia software runtime.
colinthompson 10y ago
When Google Reader was in its heyday, I remember thinking the futuristic promise of the web from the early 90s had finally arrived. I so miss it. So much effort is put into unique "platforms" nowadays — I get why Reader (and by extension RSS) can't survive in such an environment where exclusive attention of our eyeballs is monetized — but I do sometimes wish I would wake up to an announcement that RSS is a priority for big companies once again. One can dream.
michaelmior 10y ago
I'm not sure what this has to do with responsive design, but this is a cool list of some things to be aware of :)
- Etheryte 10y ago
  Making your content reasonably usable without any CSS is (or at least should be) the epitome of responsive design.
spdustin 10y ago
Yahoo! Weather's RSS feed has some handy additional data. Useful if you only have a US postal code. Includes things like lat/long coords, separate elements with weather forecasts ad current conditions, sunrise/sunset times... Pretty handy bits of data just for requesting an RSS feed. https://developer.yahoo.com/weather/archive.html#response https://developer.yahoo.com/weather/archive.html#response Bonus: the @code attribute can be substituted into the URL for an image, and visually identify the weather condition referred to by the code: https://s.yimg.com/zz/combo?a/i/us/we/52/26.gif https://s.yimg.com/zz/combo?a/i/us/we/52/26.gif Just replace "26" part of "26.gif" with another value.
Animats 10y ago
For the last three days, we've had a Teletype Model 14 tape printer following the Reuters RSS feed [1] at a steampunk convention in San Jose, printing hundreds of feet of 8mm paper tape. Trying to condense RSS down to all-upper-case Baudot tape printing is harsh. All markup is deleted. All links are deleted. Most characters outside letters and numbers become "?". For the Reuters feeds, this works out fine. The content is text, not markup. There are few or no HTML tags. The Reuters feeds are headlines and a sentence or two. The Associated Press also has RSS feeds, and it's very similar. The Voice of America's feeds are much wordier; they often have the whole article. Space News has an RSS feed.[2] The Senate Democrats have an RSS feed covering what's happening on the Senate floor.[3] (The GOP discontinued their feed.[4]) The House Energy and Commerce Committee has a feed with markup in embedded JSON.[5] Not sure what's going on there. Even The Hollywood Reporter has an RSS feed.[6] So for real news, RSS is in good shape. RSS seems to be doing fine for sources that have something important to say. [1] http://feeds.reuters.com/reuters/topNews http://feeds.reuters.com/reuters/topNews [2] http://spacenews.com/feed/ http://spacenews.com/feed/ [3] https://democrats.senate.gov/feed/ https://democrats.senate.gov/feed/ [4] http://www.gop.gov/static/index.php http://www.gop.gov/static/index.php [5] https://energycommerce.house.gov/rss.xml?GroupTypeID=1 https://energycommerce.house.gov/rss.xml?GroupTypeID=1 [6] http://feeds.feedburner.com/thr/news http://feeds.feedburner.com/thr/news
amatriain 10y ago
I develop and maintain an open source RSS reader. In my experience it's not so bad. I strip CSS and javascript from feeds, and most of them are displayed fine anyway. I don't think I've ever found a feed that needed javascript to load content, it seems even SPAs include plain entry content in their feeds, thankfully. I've never found a feed that became unreadable after stripping styling either. I agree it's interesting to look at your content when loaded in an RSS reader. IMHO most feeds are actually more readable when loaded in a clean uncluttered RSS reader than in the original webpage. If the content is good, the reading experience should not be harmed by focusing just on its text and images and removing extra styling. Shameless plug: the RSS reader I maintain is https://www.feedbunch.com https://www.feedbunch.com , comments are welcome.
- onli 10y ago
  I also think it is not so bad. It is the responsibility of the reader to style the content, for example to auto-size images via css so they don't get too big. If the reader does that, the feed content will in 99.99% of all cases be at least as readable as with the original styling.
- StavrosK 10y ago
  Feedbunch looks great, all I want from an RSS reader is to show me a list of my feeds, and to show me the unread items in each feed, which it seems to do beautifully! Unfortunately, I dislove the fact that it clicking on a list item would just show "loading..." forever :( Firefox 46.0.1 on Ubuntu with uBlock, if it helps.
  - amatriain 10y ago
    It certainly shouldn't do that. Unfortunately I cannot reproduce it, it works fine here. Loading entries (among other things) is done with web workers. Are you blocking the execution of web workers or dynamic loading of remote javascripts, by any chance?
    - StavrosK 10y ago
      I shouldn't be. What's worse, it works fine now. Yesterday I didn't even get the tutorial, which makes me think that some JS wouldn't load. I think I'll switch to it as my default reader, thank you! EDIT: Ah, the demo worked but my signed-up account does not. EDIT 2: It works erratically.
ruricolist 10y ago
I think the nastiest thing to parse in RSS feeds these days is code highlighting. To a surprising degree, people who should know better use blogging software that chops up code into tables, divs, and spans, and styles them with CSS that is not included in the feed. You either have to either reconstruct the underlying plain-text code as best you can, or try to recognize and support a zoo of different highlighting libraries.
- StavrosK 10y ago
  ...oops. Good point, I never thought of that. I'll include a style in my own blog, thanks!

221 points by begriffs 10y ago

dave2000 10y ago

RSS is odd. Unloved by many, killed by Google, but there's still no better way of getting notified that a rarely (or perhaps not so rarely if you have endless time to read "internet stuff") updated site has something new to read. So I have an Android app which checks once per day and if there's anything new that day (I can go days or weeks without an update) I then pass it on to my Pocket account. Sometimes it goes another step further and I send it on to my Kindle. Perhaps there's a better way of handling this. I can't read it directly on my Kindle because the browser there - optimistically described "experimental" - is shocking. Pocket is great because it does a good job of producing a page which consists of just the typing without the usual horrific web fluff (although sometimes it gets it wrong and the graphics go missing). It seems a shame that, when most of what I'm interested in started life as someone else essentially entering text into a document, there's no way of obtaining it in that form but instead it has to be manipulated into something sensible. I don't want an "experience"; I just want to read what you've typed. Would it help if I gave you my email address?

exolymph 10y ago
I think your last line is tongue-in-cheek, but it's actually my preferred approach. > still no better way of getting notified that a rarely (or perhaps not so rarely if you have endless time to read "internet stuff") updated site has something new to read. Maybe it's because I became a heavy web user after RSS was already on its way out (of the mainstream), but my favorite way to be notified is an email newsletter. I don't care very much about the frequency because I save everything to Instapaper anyway and read it weeks later.
iMiiTH 10y ago
It would be fantastic if there was a standard format like you suggested, it would also make the web a whole lot more accessible.
- ktRolster 10y ago
  "Marc Andreessen" suggested something like that at the bottom of this: http://www.zerobugsandprogramfaster.net/essays/2.html http://www.zerobugsandprogramfaster.net/essays/2.html (search for "separate content from presentation")
  - dave2000 10y ago
    I thought the whole point of css was to separate content from presentation. But it only seems to be used for reskinning sites and - occasionally - for producing a "printer view". I suppose I could pretend to be a printer. But can I not instead just pretend to want to read the text?
- wtbob 10y ago
  > It would be fantastic if there was a standard format like you suggested I thought that's what HTML was supposed to be … Somehow it turned into a portable runtime instead.
wtbob 10y ago
> I don't want an "experience"; I just want to read what you've typed. Exactly. That's why I prefer command-line browsers (and like reader mode): I just want to see words, not distraction.
atom058 10y ago
Regarding reading news on the Kindle: I've noticed that the browser becomes much more responsive (read: usable) if one disables JavaScript altogether. Sure, some websites will break, but most will work well enough to be able to read articles. Disabling JavaScript is also my trick for actually being able to browse the internet on a phone these days. In Firefox for Android, you can install a plugin to toggle it on/off for when you need it. A bit sad that you have to do this to get at decent experience, but what can you do...

mmahemoff 10y ago

As the developer of an RSS parser, I spend a lot of time hitting View Source, surprisingly often on pages that appear empty in Chrome. In a more general sense than RSS, I also have to install extensions to format JSON. Considering how much browsers are targeting developers these days, might they consider rendering JSON, XML, etc in some standard way that is useful to developers (as an option at least). I am talking about syntax highlighting as well as some basic interactive features like expanding/collapsing.

azernik 10y ago
As far as I know Firefox does this for XML; haven't tried it lately, so I don't know if it behaves similarly for JSON (I know Chrome doesn't).
- bzbarsky 10y ago
  Firefox nightly and developer edition show JSON loaded directly in a tab (i.e. not in a subframe) in a nice JSON viewer), and have for a while now. Release Firefox does not, for various reasons (including the fact that the current JSON viewer implementation actually changes the DOM of the page involved, which is technically an HTML spec violation).
chrisrhoden 10y ago
If there are no style parser directives, chrome will render the XML very nicely by default, in my experience. As the developer of an RSS parser

exolymph 10y ago

It depends on who your audience is, right? If most of the people who read your site come from social media on their phones instead of reading via RSS, optimizing for RSS readability is an activity with rapidly diminishing returns.

slyall 10y ago
but how did your article get onto social media? Was it one of the 20 people who read your RSS feed and linked to it on twitter and elsewhere? Been there, done that, got the Hackernews Karma. But if you want to optomise for casual readers vs people who want to actively subscribe to your content...

toyg 10y ago

Hey, a post about RSS content quirks! It makes me feel young again! On a more serious note - RSS is the Great Web Leveller. It spites your fancy CSS hacks, it's disgusted by your insane javascript, and it will piss all over your "mobile-optimized" crap. No semantic markup == no party; because markup is for robots, and RSS parsers are very stubborn robots that can see through web-hipster bullshit like Superman through walls. The only real sin of RSS (beyond the holy wars and format bikeshedding and committee madness and and and...) is that it's too honest a format. It's a format for stuff that matters, for content that deserves to be read; it's too pure to survive in a world of content silos, stalking analytics and inaccessible material-designs. Its innocence doomed it in a very poetic way.

usaphp 10y ago
> "web-hipster bullshit" Why so much negativity lately regarding new trends in the web?
- bordercases 10y ago
  I can voice my perspective. Essentially: bike-shedding, bedazzlement, and bloat.
- gue5t 10y ago
  Because continued development of the Web is an obvious, user-hostile money-grab. If you only care about getting your software to users, you have a million choices for your application runtime. If you want to monetize every user by selling their privacy or headspace, you have only one: i.e., "pirating" Facebook is a logical impossibility. Communicative efficacy on the Web has not improved since the early 1990s--Javascript and its ilk have virtually no positive effect on the usefulness of Wikipedia, for example. We're converting what was intended to be a transport for communication into a framework for writing portable software. The thesis here is that there should be a digital way to share hypertext articles and other statically-described communication without pay the costs (privacy, rendering efficiency, security bugs, transport performance and uncacheability, accessibility) associated with a cross-platform sandboxed multimedia software runtime.

colinthompson 10y ago

When Google Reader was in its heyday, I remember thinking the futuristic promise of the web from the early 90s had finally arrived. I so miss it. So much effort is put into unique "platforms" nowadays — I get why Reader (and by extension RSS) can't survive in such an environment where exclusive attention of our eyeballs is monetized — but I do sometimes wish I would wake up to an announcement that RSS is a priority for big companies once again. One can dream.

michaelmior 10y ago

I'm not sure what this has to do with responsive design, but this is a cool list of some things to be aware of :)

Etheryte 10y ago
Making your content reasonably usable without any CSS is (or at least should be) the epitome of responsive design.

spdustin 10y ago

Yahoo! Weather's RSS feed has some handy additional data. Useful if you only have a US postal code. Includes things like lat/long coords, separate elements with weather forecasts ad current conditions, sunrise/sunset times... Pretty handy bits of data just for requesting an RSS feed. https://developer.yahoo.com/weather/archive.html#response https://developer.yahoo.com/weather/archive.html#response Bonus: the @code attribute can be substituted into the URL for an image, and visually identify the weather condition referred to by the code: https://s.yimg.com/zz/combo?a/i/us/we/52/26.gif https://s.yimg.com/zz/combo?a/i/us/we/52/26.gif Just replace "26" part of "26.gif" with another value.

Animats 10y ago

For the last three days, we've had a Teletype Model 14 tape printer following the Reuters RSS feed [1] at a steampunk convention in San Jose, printing hundreds of feet of 8mm paper tape. Trying to condense RSS down to all-upper-case Baudot tape printing is harsh. All markup is deleted. All links are deleted. Most characters outside letters and numbers become "?". For the Reuters feeds, this works out fine. The content is text, not markup. There are few or no HTML tags. The Reuters feeds are headlines and a sentence or two. The Associated Press also has RSS feeds, and it's very similar. The Voice of America's feeds are much wordier; they often have the whole article. Space News has an RSS feed.[2] The Senate Democrats have an RSS feed covering what's happening on the Senate floor.[3] (The GOP discontinued their feed.[4]) The House Energy and Commerce Committee has a feed with markup in embedded JSON.[5] Not sure what's going on there. Even The Hollywood Reporter has an RSS feed.[6] So for real news, RSS is in good shape. RSS seems to be doing fine for sources that have something important to say. [1] http://feeds.reuters.com/reuters/topNews http://feeds.reuters.com/reuters/topNews [2] http://spacenews.com/feed/ http://spacenews.com/feed/ [3] https://democrats.senate.gov/feed/ https://democrats.senate.gov/feed/ [4] http://www.gop.gov/static/index.php http://www.gop.gov/static/index.php [5] https://energycommerce.house.gov/rss.xml?GroupTypeID=1 https://energycommerce.house.gov/rss.xml?GroupTypeID=1 [6] http://feeds.feedburner.com/thr/news http://feeds.feedburner.com/thr/news

amatriain 10y ago

I develop and maintain an open source RSS reader. In my experience it's not so bad. I strip CSS and javascript from feeds, and most of them are displayed fine anyway. I don't think I've ever found a feed that needed javascript to load content, it seems even SPAs include plain entry content in their feeds, thankfully. I've never found a feed that became unreadable after stripping styling either. I agree it's interesting to look at your content when loaded in an RSS reader. IMHO most feeds are actually more readable when loaded in a clean uncluttered RSS reader than in the original webpage. If the content is good, the reading experience should not be harmed by focusing just on its text and images and removing extra styling. Shameless plug: the RSS reader I maintain is https://www.feedbunch.com https://www.feedbunch.com , comments are welcome.

onli 10y ago
I also think it is not so bad. It is the responsibility of the reader to style the content, for example to auto-size images via css so they don't get too big. If the reader does that, the feed content will in 99.99% of all cases be at least as readable as with the original styling.
StavrosK 10y ago
Feedbunch looks great, all I want from an RSS reader is to show me a list of my feeds, and to show me the unread items in each feed, which it seems to do beautifully! Unfortunately, I dislove the fact that it clicking on a list item would just show "loading..." forever :( Firefox 46.0.1 on Ubuntu with uBlock, if it helps.
- amatriain 10y ago
  It certainly shouldn't do that. Unfortunately I cannot reproduce it, it works fine here. Loading entries (among other things) is done with web workers. Are you blocking the execution of web workers or dynamic loading of remote javascripts, by any chance?
  - StavrosK 10y ago
    I shouldn't be. What's worse, it works fine now. Yesterday I didn't even get the tutorial, which makes me think that some JS wouldn't load. I think I'll switch to it as my default reader, thank you! EDIT: Ah, the demo worked but my signed-up account does not. EDIT 2: It works erratically.

ruricolist 10y ago

I think the nastiest thing to parse in RSS feeds these days is code highlighting. To a surprising degree, people who should know better use blogging software that chops up code into tables, divs, and spans, and styles them with CSS that is not included in the feed. You either have to either reconstruct the underlying plain-text code as best you can, or try to recognize and support a zoo of different highlighting libraries.

StavrosK 10y ago
...oops. Good point, I never thought of that. I'll include a style in my own blog, thanks!