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Amusingly your complaint is actually my preferred use-case. I want my RSS reader to essentially work like an automated link gatherer, because the reader's UI is

Amusingly your complaint is actually my preferred use-case. I want my RSS reader to essentially work like an automated link gatherer, because the reader's UI is inherently not going to be the intended presentation medium for most content. I exclusively open the collected links in separate tabs to read and I get annoyed when I accidentally expand them.

Dylan16807 8y ago
And including the article body preserves both options as a choice. > because the reader's UI is inherently not going to be the intended presentation medium for most content Huh, you must use RSS for different things than I do. The blogs I follow via RSS work fine, and I only go to the site for comments on some of them. The podcasts and tumblr posts work much better in their respective readers than visiting any website.
- anyfoo 8y ago
  Apparently we do use it for different things. One example is Raymond Chen’s excellent blog The Old New Thing, which has formatting that often breaks completely on RSS, to the point of being unreadable (he does not have any influence on the blog software as far as I know, though). Generally, I often noticed that articles look (and sometimes convey their content) much better on their actual websites, since that’s what they were formatted for first most. Much more infuriating is that the various “Reader Modes” in browsers and e.g. Pocket sometimes not only tends to omit images, but even whole paragraphs of the text. It’s hard to notice that you missed a paragraph that you don’t know existed, so I don’t trust them anymore. I believe that should be less of an issue in RSS, since it of course includes the text to be displayed in the feed. Still, since I cannot be sure that authors take full attention to their RSS feeds, I prefer reading them on the website just in case some other formatting quirk messes things up. Stuff like info boxes or illustrations might not even be part of the main body. In that way, I actually prefer it when the RSS feed just contains a meaningful preview. Though I guess the correct solution would be to include both a preview and the full article, designated as such in the structure.
- delecti 8y ago
  About a third of what I follow is webcomics, which often have extra information in hover-text or bonus links, and I like the presentation of the site itself. XKCD includes the alt text in the RSS feed, but I still prefer the presentation on the actual website. The context of content is as much a part of the experience as the content itself. Another third are recipes, which include so much extraneous backstory and contextual pictures that they're obnoxious to navigate in a nested panel of another website. It's easier to scroll ~2/3 down the page to get to the recipe on the actual webpage than in the reader. This is arguably a complaint about the specific presentation in my reader. > And including the article body preserves both options as a choice. Certainly. I don't want to impose my preference on the RSS ecosystem, I'm just expressing a different point of view.
barrkel 8y ago
> intended presentation medium My choice of reader is certainly my intended presentation medium.
- anyfoo 8y ago
  That’s a bit like saying “my choice of watching widescreen videos as zoomed in and cropped square images is certainly my intended choice of medium”. That’s cool, but don’t wonder then if important details are missing.
jamesgeck0 8y ago
> the reader's UI is inherently not going to be the intended presentation medium It's close enough. I use reader view on any post on a website that's even slightly annoying to look at.
- anyfoo 8y ago
  As I mentioned as a reply to a sibling comment: Beware, I definitely saw reader views not only omitting illustrations, formulas and info boxes, but whole paragraphs of the actual text. I don’t trust it anymore. It would be nice if content and presentation were sufficiently separated as initially imagined, but I don’t believe that to be current reality.
  - BuckRogers 8y ago
    That's true, but it's still worth it. I can barely read most sites anymore on mobile or desktop without reader mode. I use Firefox but Edge and Safari's reader modes are also great.
  - jamesgeck0 8y ago
    Yeah, that happens with some websites. It's usually pretty apparent. Although sometimes I disable the reader view because I think a paragraph was skipped, but it's just poor writing.
akho 8y ago
Google Reader had a little-known feature — a bookmarklet that opened the next unread item (the original page, not a google reader page). That, for a while, was my preferred method for rssing. A magic button that brings you somewhere good and familiar.
berti 8y ago
I'm doing about the same, each morning I middle-click all the items in feeder.co's dropdown (filtered on new items only), peruse each of the resulting tabs over coffee.
SimeVidas 8y ago
Exactly. RSS is the best way to get notified when new articles are published but I still want to read them on the actual blog, not some sub-par feed reader UI.

Dylan16807 8y ago

And including the article body preserves both options as a choice. > because the reader's UI is inherently not going to be the intended presentation medium for most content Huh, you must use RSS for different things than I do. The blogs I follow via RSS work fine, and I only go to the site for comments on some of them. The podcasts and tumblr posts work much better in their respective readers than visiting any website.

anyfoo 8y ago
Apparently we do use it for different things. One example is Raymond Chen’s excellent blog The Old New Thing, which has formatting that often breaks completely on RSS, to the point of being unreadable (he does not have any influence on the blog software as far as I know, though). Generally, I often noticed that articles look (and sometimes convey their content) much better on their actual websites, since that’s what they were formatted for first most. Much more infuriating is that the various “Reader Modes” in browsers and e.g. Pocket sometimes not only tends to omit images, but even whole paragraphs of the text. It’s hard to notice that you missed a paragraph that you don’t know existed, so I don’t trust them anymore. I believe that should be less of an issue in RSS, since it of course includes the text to be displayed in the feed. Still, since I cannot be sure that authors take full attention to their RSS feeds, I prefer reading them on the website just in case some other formatting quirk messes things up. Stuff like info boxes or illustrations might not even be part of the main body. In that way, I actually prefer it when the RSS feed just contains a meaningful preview. Though I guess the correct solution would be to include both a preview and the full article, designated as such in the structure.
delecti 8y ago
About a third of what I follow is webcomics, which often have extra information in hover-text or bonus links, and I like the presentation of the site itself. XKCD includes the alt text in the RSS feed, but I still prefer the presentation on the actual website. The context of content is as much a part of the experience as the content itself. Another third are recipes, which include so much extraneous backstory and contextual pictures that they're obnoxious to navigate in a nested panel of another website. It's easier to scroll ~2/3 down the page to get to the recipe on the actual webpage than in the reader. This is arguably a complaint about the specific presentation in my reader. > And including the article body preserves both options as a choice. Certainly. I don't want to impose my preference on the RSS ecosystem, I'm just expressing a different point of view.

barrkel 8y ago

> intended presentation medium My choice of reader is certainly my intended presentation medium.

anyfoo 8y ago
That’s a bit like saying “my choice of watching widescreen videos as zoomed in and cropped square images is certainly my intended choice of medium”. That’s cool, but don’t wonder then if important details are missing.

jamesgeck0 8y ago

> the reader's UI is inherently not going to be the intended presentation medium It's close enough. I use reader view on any post on a website that's even slightly annoying to look at.

anyfoo 8y ago
As I mentioned as a reply to a sibling comment: Beware, I definitely saw reader views not only omitting illustrations, formulas and info boxes, but whole paragraphs of the actual text. I don’t trust it anymore. It would be nice if content and presentation were sufficiently separated as initially imagined, but I don’t believe that to be current reality.
- BuckRogers 8y ago
  That's true, but it's still worth it. I can barely read most sites anymore on mobile or desktop without reader mode. I use Firefox but Edge and Safari's reader modes are also great.
- jamesgeck0 8y ago
  Yeah, that happens with some websites. It's usually pretty apparent. Although sometimes I disable the reader view because I think a paragraph was skipped, but it's just poor writing.

akho 8y ago

Google Reader had a little-known feature — a bookmarklet that opened the next unread item (the original page, not a google reader page). That, for a while, was my preferred method for rssing. A magic button that brings you somewhere good and familiar.

berti 8y ago

I'm doing about the same, each morning I middle-click all the items in feeder.co's dropdown (filtered on new items only), peruse each of the resulting tabs over coffee.

SimeVidas 8y ago

Exactly. RSS is the best way to get notified when new articles are published but I still want to read them on the actual blog, not some sub-par feed reader UI.