
The real responsive design challenge is RSS - begriffs
https://begriffs.com/posts/2016-05-28-rss-responsive-design.html?hn=1
======
toyg
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
> "web-hipster bullshit"

Why so much negativity lately regarding new trends in the web?

~~~
toyg
One reason might be that, for anyone with historical perspective, a situation
where our pipes can download hundreds of MB per second and _still_ our
browsers crawl like turtles is just shocking. Modern browsers are the most
compatible ever and come with all sorts of bells and whistles baked in, and
_still_ people are using JS frameworks over JS frameworks over JS frameworks.

Another reason might be that most of this website-fat is actively anti-users.
It breaks the back button. It breaks bookmarks. It spies on you. It makes it
impossible to interoperate/mash stuff, and it makes it incredibly hard to
automate things (do you know that in the '90s you used to be able to download
entire websites, so you could comfortably read them offline?).

Another reason is probably that a lot of "mainstream web plumbers" (like yours
truly) are now hitting late middle-age and feeling it hard. We used to be able
to view-source and copypaste our way to image-rollover glory; we were
breathing markup and feeds... now it's all tooling and frameworks and stacks,
even http is going binary, and it feels like the loss of this innocence is not
actually gaining anything for anyone except marketing people.

Now get off my lawn.

~~~
girvo
> _and still people are using JS frameworks over JS frameworks over JS
> frameworks_

Even as someone who is ostensibly a front-end hipster dev (long live React),
this is something I'm in total agreement with.

Every single web developer should take 10 minutes, and go have a poke around
WebPlatform[0], and see what these amazing networked virtual machines we call
browsers can do natively these days. And they can do it well faster than
anything we can write ourselves. Of course, browser support is an issue, which
is why polyfilling _as needed_ should still be the name of the game, but it
genuinely blows my mind how often I've seen devs add a brittle dependency to
the code-base for something browsers can do themselves, better, faster, and
supported back to some seriously old browsers!

[0] [https://www.webplatform.org/](https://www.webplatform.org/)

~~~
cuckcuckspruce
Thanks for the link the WebPlatform. It's a great resource for me as someone
who only occasionally touches the front-end.

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dave2000
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?

~~~
iMiiTH
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
"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
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?

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Animats
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)

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amatriain
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.

~~~
StavrosK
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
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
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.

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colinthompson
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.

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mmahemoff
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
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
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).

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

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spdustin
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.

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exolymph
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
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...

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

