It’s hard to imagine an Internet without web feeds. While there are people who prefer to keep track of websites the old fashioned way — bookmark and visit the site once every day to see what’s new — feeds are faster and much more convenient. Feed readers were the first real aggregators, I think, back when aggregation still wasn’t cool. It was an easy way to keep people on your site while serving them content from all over the web. Of course, not all feed readers have survived. Only a handful of web based ones are popular, and desktop feed readers are almost a dying breed. Kind of. My problem, however, isn’t so much with feeds and feed readers, as it is with the behaviour of feed reading.⌘

Designers work hard to create attractive containers for content on the web. Content alone is not king. Its presentation plays a huge part in how it is perceived. I am a minimalist, trying to reach the bare minimum that it takes to make something look good. But I appreciate and respect the effort it takes to create a good design. Online portfolios and resumés are all well and good, but most of the activity happens around our weblogs. The ever changing, always new aspect of it keeps people interested. Designers put an equal amount of effort to make these blogs look beautiful and attractive, maybe more than the other parts of the site, because of that reason. They experiment with the typography (something I’ve developed a very recent, and very intense infatuation with), the layout, arrangement and colours of the text. It takes a decent amount of effort to create a weblog that reflects a designers creativity because more often than not, all you’re dealing with is massive amounts of text.⌘

But all that effort comes to naught.⌘

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Every weblog offers feeds, and most of them show off the number of subscribers very proudly (and rather crudely, if I may add). I usually don’t care if it is a run of the mill technology journal with the latest breaking news. But every once in a while, I come across a truly beautiful weblog, and I can’t help but wonder how many people actually see the posts like the writer/designer meant them to be seen. Feed readers take us back to the time when people used text-only browsers. Sure, they were fast, but the web has evolved into something so much more beautiful. Living inside a feed reader, people miss out on a lot of it.⌘

Text is arranged in so many ways to compliment the way of writing. Taking my example (since it’s closest to home), I have footnotes and small floating blurbs of extra information. All these are styled in a certain way for tangible reasons, not just because it looks nice. And where there is styling on the web, there is CSS. Feed readers aggressively break that model. It can be argued that if one were to follow the principle of model-view-controllers, the content should make sense even without the styling. At least, that’s how accessibility zealots teach us to design web pages — to write the markup first, and then apply the CSS later, to get an idea of how it will degrade at the bare minimum level. But usability is not everything. The whole point of advancements in the web, browsers, CSS and HTML is so that we can leverage it to create new things that weren’t possible before.⌘

It’s probably idle nitpicking on my part, but I prefer what I write to show up in the way I intend it to¹, as I’m sure many designers do. I hate a sub-par experience, a “make do” for the sake of convenience. It’s like settling for a BMW 3-series because one couldn’t afford a 5-series. The payoff just isn’t worth it.⌘

Font’s Face

Presentation of the written word is so important. It’s why designers even have a job. Beautiful typography is meant to invoke certain emotions and feelings when the text in question is read. I’ve always found it strangely apt to call the type of font its “face”. Just like a person’s face is a window to the emotional context of what they’re saying, a text’s font sets the mood for what it’s trying to say. When you take the text out of its container, and display it somewhere else in its skeletal form, a lot of that meaning is lost in translation. I’m not exaggerating here, but sometimes the hideousness of certain texts turn me away from reading them, because I see no point in trying to grasp their meaning by trying to look beyond the obvious ugliness. It’s like a hair in one’s eye — you try to blink it away, ignore it, but it still distracts you away from the task at hand.⌘

I make it a point to read things outside of my feed reader and at the web page where the text appears — whether that be a news site or a weblog. This achieves two broad purposes: 1) I’m able to quickly open and keep in the background items that I find interesting and want to dedicate more time to, which allows me to skim over hundreds of updates and ignore the ones I don’t want to read. Doing this eventually adds to hours saved in reading every week. 2) It generates page views for the site in question. I consider it my little contribution and thanks for the effort the author takes to write the piece and inform me. It’s quite the win-win. But I severely doubt too many people do the same thing. They choose to stay in the familiarity of their feed reader where everything is uniform and bare.⌘

One way to make people break out of that habit would be to reduce entries in feeds to summaries. I know; the first word that comes to mind when you hear that is “evil”. It’s terribly inconvenient, sure. But if it means getting the full impact of the text, why not? Most of the publications have resorted to that behaviour now anyway, to increase revenue from ads in these troubled times. They might not realise it, but I think they’re doing us all a big favour.⌘

In any case, while I cannot see a solution for this any time soon, I hope someone else does. Something that maintains the convenience of an aggregator, and the context of the text’s original design. That, would probably the best thing to happen for text on the web since the rise of personal content publishing.⌘