RSS Reader Styles
RSS is becoming quite a big deal to a lot of people, I think helped along by so many people blogging and talking about things that are interesting to others.
All this extra information has then lead to some differing methods of accessing that information, and RSS Readers are attracting many people trying to cope with so much to keep up with.
One of the critisisms of RSS Readers though, and I can completely identify with it, is that you don’t get any of the feel of the site whose content you are reading. You get it displayed in the RSS Readers style (or if you use something like FeedDemon, you may have a choice of styles, but still, it’s not the sites style).
In these days of frontier web designers talking about the seperation of style and content, it seems that we should perhaps be able to give away the data, but also provide a chosen way of displaying that data at the same time.
Most sites have some kind of look and feel about them, many blogs may have a similar layout, but they have different colour schemes and logo’s that help define who they are. It does seem a shame to miss out on this by using a plain RSS Reader, especially when some are so visually stunning.
So I’m thinking, we have some tools that should in theory be applicable to this kind of usage. CSS seems ideally suited to offering an RSS Reader suggestions on how to style the data it’s picking up.
Take a web based reader like Bloglines for example, if it were to pick up on a Stylesheet with say an RSS Media type, it could use the style guides to help give the person reading it, some of the feel of the site serving the feed. Nothing too fancy, probably no positioning, just perhaps a few things like background colours, font colours and families, heading styles, logo or identifying images……
Look at a site like Mezzoblue, and imagine picking up on the Red’s, Orange’s, Blue’s used in the colour scheme. Imagine the posts picking up the same kind of styling as you see them have on the front page.
You could get a much richer experience reading a site’s posts in at least the general style, if not the same layout, as the site they originate from.
There are some problems….. It would probably call for a different RSS Spec that could define a Style Sheet to use. There’s the additional development time to do it, it would require RSS readers to be able to render some basic CSS…..
Some of the technicalities and getting it used might not work out, I think the end results could be nice though.