WebProNews has an article today by Steve Rubel musing about the difficulties RSS/Atom feed creators have in formatting decisions. “There’s not a lot a designer can do now to control how their feed looks in an reader.”

Um, really? Richard Soderberg was demonstrating how to use CSS and stylesheets in RSS and Atom back in December 2003. Even including images with an absolute location to a webserver is a piece of cake.

I’m not sure I agree that the web designers have nearly as much heartburn ahead of them as the online aggregators do.

The folks in for a bumpy ride are the online guys like BlogLines, NetNewsWire, and NewsGator Online who aggregate various feed items into one webpage. Unless they go to great lengths to strip out style overrides in the feed items themselves (a nasty business), the styles from each feed will step on each other.

The next obvious problem that seems to be on the horizon is the “GreaseMonkey Conundrum”: Who really owns the layout? Many websites are preventing GreaseMonkey-enabled browsers from accessing their pages in order to keep control over layout and functionality.

Is it just me, or do these things always seem to wind up in the hands of lawyers?

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 11th, 2005 at 17:25 and is filed under syndication. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.