Categories: uncategorized
Date: 01 November 2005 15:44:21
One of my regular reads in Bloglines is We Break Stuff. A recent article about how syndication feeds - RSS and the link - means that there are less people seeing your lovely website design got me thinking.
I know this goes completely against what XML is designed to do, and also makes a mockery of the whole reasoning behind RSS, but (dammit, Jim) it might just work.
How about we add another node to the RSS (and Atom and RDF) specs for a special syndicator-only stylesheet. For example (I've used my blog XML file for this):
<channel rdf:about="http://www.wibsite.com/wiblog/geektimes/wiblog.xml">
<title>The Geek Times</title>
<link>http://www.wiblog.com/geektimes/</link>
<description>For the geek in all of us... </description>
<dc:date>2005-09-15T11:20:35+00:00</dc:date>
<dc:language>en-GB</dc:language>
<admin:generatorAgent rdf:resource="http://www.wibsite.com/wiblog/"/>
<admin:errorReportsTo rdf:resource="mailto:***@***.***"/>
<admin:syndicatorStylesheet rdf:resource="http://www.wiblog.com/geektimes/syndicator.css"/>
That syndicator-only stylesheet would contain just a few selectors designed to style the content of the entry in the feed reader. So, scanning through my Bloglines list, I'd get at least a simple taste of what the website looks like where that particular article came from.
See, I told you it was a mad idea.
However I decided to do a quick screenshot which you can see here. Yes, I know the example is rubbish, I'm not a very good designer. Just imagine what Mr Oxton could do with his flowers, or what Mr Clarke could do with his motorbike?
In fact, being constrained to just designing a wrapper for a single article might make designers "think outside the box". (Apparently that's what proper web people say, so that's why I said it.) They do say that when you're constrained creatively, that's when you come up with your best design work.
So, have I finally lost it, or am I an undiscovered genius? Almost certainly the former...
