Style Sheets Are the Faces of the Web
Comments: 10
Steven Frank puts his finger on something that’s been going through my mind lately:
When you separate the words from the design, all blogs start to muddy together. Without a face to associate with the words, the author’s web design more-or-less becomes their identity. My brain says, “these words came from here” and in a real-life conversation, that “here” would be a face, but on the web, it’s someone’s stylesheet. It seems odd to strip that out by pulling it through an RSS aggregator.
NetNewsWire (RSS reader nonpareil) has become an essential application. It’s one of those load-at-startup apps that just seem so fundamentally good and well worked out. I still click through to a lot of sites, but RSS feeds allow me to maintain a kind of heirarchy of attention: sites I click through to regularly, those that I’ll often or occasionally click through to, and those that I like to keep an eye on but rarely actually visit.
I have just over 100 subscriptions in NNW. I don’t know if this is a lot or not (probably not) but it doesn’t feel like it. It feels well within my attention span to follow these feeds, whereas there’d be no way I’d follow the same number of sites regularly (daily!) without RSS. Steven says —
Half of the time, I scan through entries in NNW. The other half, I just pull up the blogs in the browser. As far as I can tell, there’s no real reason or rhyme to what I’m doing. It bothers me when I realize I can’t figure out my own motives for doing things a certain way.
— but it may just be that RSS feeds enable a hybrid browsing approach that’s flexible enough to provide a variety of methods, neither rhyme nor reason required. Browse as the mood strikes you, or as the need to procrastinate dictates.
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Posted to Computers • 2003.09.17 (Wed) • 16:29
Comments
Posted by Kristen 2003.09.17, 20:49
I’ve never really warmed to NNW and it’s brethren, precisely because I like to see the face of the person who I’m reading…maybe my procrastinating would be briefer (or my list of sites to read longer) if I didn’t need the layout,,,
Posted by Jeff 2003.09.17, 22:12
Have you tried Shrook? It’s a newsreader AND allows you to see the actual Web site. It pulls info from Safari.
Posted by Keith 2003.09.18, 01:50
This is something I’ve often thought about as well. I don’t use NNW for anything more than letting me know a site has been updated. I find I much prefer to read from the site itself.
The concept of a design being a “face” of sorts is a good and interesting one.
Posted by Christopher 2003.09.18, 03:07
I’ve also found that NNW is simply irreplaceable. My habits tend to use it as a “filter” of sorts. I too have tons of subscriptions and just loading all of those web pages would take some time. NNW does that step for me and keeps up with the content as it changes. I only have to go to the site if it has been updated.
But, like I said, I use it as a filter to only visit entries that pique my curiousity. I still like to do my actual reading at the blog site in question. It is a question of visual symantics. There are times that the web presentation can give more meaning/background to the post than can a pure text version.
Posted by Simon Fodden 2003.09.18, 05:45
I treat NNW pretty much like my email program, but one with fairly extended headers. Then I can follow up the posts that interest me — particularly, those that I know will be enhanced by their web presentation and those that are really just links to the real site of interest. (I go to those latter directly from NNW if the blogger has given me the link.)
Posted by Colin 2003.09.18, 16:54
I have to agree with that. The web page designs are like the sigs on slashdot, without them, I’m not too confident I could tell who is who.
Posted by Scott Johnson 2003.09.19, 01:25
I am familiar with the strange behavior of reading some sites only in the aggregator and others by actually clicking through to the site. In most cases, it’s the more visually appealing sites (such as this one) that I find myself clicking through to.
Posted by Jacob Arnold 2003.09.19, 05:32
NNW’s developer discusses this as well. It sounds like he’s considering implementing stylesheets in the newsreader.
Posted by Mike Tigas 2003.09.19, 07:57
I’ve tried the RSS thing, but it really hasn’t clicked with me. However, I use an RSS Reader plugin to Mozilla Firebird (my main browser) on a couple sites. Mostly news sites, but I’ve got a couple blog feeds on there. All I really do with that is just look at the headlines—I’ll end up going there anyways if there’s an update.
Hm… Now that I think of it, I haven’t really used it in the past week or two. I like fonts, I like colors, pictures, design. I don’t like a website easily if the design doesn’t strike me as something unique or something cool. Even after years on the web, it’s always been that way.
Posted by AdLad 2003.09.23, 06:43
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