Greg Reinacker discusses the issue of how RSS should be used to read posted content. (Greg is the author of the NewsGator RSS aggregator.) There are two issues: The first is should RSS aggregators also grab the referenced content. The second is what should be put into the RSS entry.
On the first issue, it's clear that if users want an aggregator to grab the complete content, someone will create a news aggregator that does just that.
There are practical problems, though. Grabbing the content involves HTML scraping, which is imperfect at best. There are countermeasures against that kind of activity, too. An author could divide the story among several pages linked together, so that HTML scraping would grab only the first page. HTML scraping could also lead to a lot of worthless HTML, images, and style sheets being stuffed into a news aggregator.
On the second issue, news aggregators are great for offline browsing. When I first got a Handspring Visor (PDA), I really liked AvantGo. I used it to read some of my favorite news sites while at the mall or elsewhere with the family. RSS is an AvantGo-like service. It's perfect for PDAs or tablet PCs. AvantGo is nothing more than a news aggregator. RSS does what AvantGo does.
There are reasons why a content author might want the RSS feed to be a teaser. The primary reason is economic: if a web site is supported by advertising, then certainly the content author wants you to view the web page decorated with advertisements, and not a stripped down version in an RSS feed. Advertising-supported authors could still put complete content into RSS feeds -- they could include ads in the feed.
There are also reasons why a content author might want the entire content in an RSS feed. AvantGo makes money by allowing corporations to use the service to disseminate their own internal information. People within the corporation need to synchronize with information that is timely. RSS could serve those users. RSS could also serve the needs of bloggers who post ideas and want maximum exposure for those ideas.
On the reverse side, the readers may or may not want complete content included in the feed. For offline reading, having the complete content available is necessary. For online reading, having only summaries presented is a great way to scan a vast amount of material efficiently.
What is necessary is a way for both summaries and complete content to be made available. Complete content could be optional both from the author's side and from the reader's side: complete content may not be provided in the feed, and readers may elect not to grab the complete content even if it's there. Perhaps the necessary changes will be adopted in Atom. (I admit to not following developments in Atom.)
With complete content being optionally made available in feeds, I think great things could happen. First, many users could take advantage of feeds as a means for synchronizing content. For example, important company information could be made available via private feeds in order for mobile users to synchronize and have up-to-date information on the go. Second, this opens the doors to more efficiency in the dissemination of information -- even ad supported content, by including ads in the content. Offline reading is just one possibility. There is also the possibility of dissemination through peer-to-peer networks. And finally, before us is the chance to focus on information, rather than entertainment. It seemed that during the dot-com boom years many viewed the Internet -- and the WWW specifically -- as a medium not much different from television. Information workers, though, have always had a different view of the Internet as an excellent tool to help them accomplish their jobs more efficiently. The move to XML and well-formed content, beginning with RSS/RDF/Atom, may not have entertainment value, but it certainly benefits information workers.
Posted by Doug Sauder at December 14, 2003 12:26 PM