Syndication vs design

What happened to RSS? Why has it ceded so much turf to centralized apps and to email newsletters? One reason is that syndication ceded design.

Feeds are text without art. Naked writing. Words. Letters. Punctuation.

A provider can’t style their posts using CSS or Javascript. As a reader, this is sometimes charming, but it can also be a loss. The presentation can be a part of the message.

Compare the version of Daring Fireball on daringfireball.net with the one in the Feedly feed reader.

The version on daringfireball.net has more readable typography. The gray background is more attractive than the black. The visual design on-site reinforces the Apple-centric theme of the site because the use of Helvetica reflects Apple’s house style.

Compare these layouts edge-to-edge. The version on daringfireball.net uses white space luxuriously to create a feeling of calm and focus.

The version in Feedly is cramped and frenetic.

Publications are not just words. Paper matters. The new book smell is heady. Covers enhance the pleasure of reading.

Blog syndication obliterates the new book smell. Readers must go elsewhere for that pleasure.

The inability to style blogs in RSS or Atom isn’t just a problem for readers, it’s also a problem for writers. Bloggers need to differentiate themselves. They need to stand out with a unique perspective. But in syndication, every blog looks the same.

Daring Fireball’s visual esthetic isn’t an accident. It looks like a Mac.

One way to approach this differently would be to embed blogs as a whole, in an iframe, and allow them to bring along their own styling.

Space shouldn’t be a critical problem – responsive design takes care of that already. Daring Fireball for iPhone, as hosted on its own site, fits roughly in the same narrow space that the syndicated text gets in Feedly.

Embedding isn’t the only way to do this. There are other ways to approach the issue of design in syndication. Feed formats and the client software which displays them could do a better job with CSS and HTML.

Email doesn’t have that problem, though. It already supports HTML and CSS. HTML and CSS in an email are nowhere near as full-featured as in a browser, but they are light-years beyond RSS.

In fact, Mailchimp is a major sponsor of Daring Fireball, which goes to the question of why Daring Fireball is not already an email newsletter.