Valhalla Island

Jeffery Zeldman said something about RSS a long time ago on an old about page:

Person: If you offered an RSS feed, I could read your stuff without visiting your site.

Zeldman: If you stored your groceries on the sidewalk, I could eat your food without sitting across the table from you.

I feel the same way. I personally dislike and don’t use them because in a lot of cases I am more interested in how the information is displayed rather than what is said. I am also a firm believer in ‘I know what the user wants better than the user does’. RSS is almost like stealing. It’s like seeing a pirated movie before it’s realeased at the cinema. Sure you still get to see the movie but you miss out on the cinema experience.

In a way I see it as a step backwards. Just like we moved from command line operating systems to GUI’s we improved upon HTML 1, with no design specification at all, to presentationally sophistocated CSS that turned the internet into a visually interesting place. RSS strips the design, images and even navigation converting sites back to the way they looked 15 years ago, plain text.

People like RSS because they can organise their many, daily visited sites within one application. I argue that this is what bookmarks were invented for and with Firefox’s ‘Open in tabs’ feature you can quickly cycle through all your daily reads with only a few clicks, all within the same window and you get the added plus of something pretty to look at.

‘But RSS tells me when sites are updated’ is maybe RSS’s only plus in my eyes. Even this is not wonderful technology. It only knows when sites are updated because it checks every few seconds or minutes.

I don’t know when everyone decided how great it was that we can all now read the content on a site without having to actually go to it. I hope that the hype over RSS dies before there’s no such thing as a graphical interface on the internet anymore and it’s back to being a huge mountain of text.