I use NetNewsWire, and I like that it's separate. The icon in my Dock lights up with a nice, big number showing me how many new items there are. If it was builtin to Safari, Safari would then have to have this same number thing on the icon, and then there'd have to be some really quick way for me to get straight to the new headlines with a single click. I can't think of a clean way for this quick access to be embedded into Safari...

I think that integration of the two a web browser and an RSS reader makes a lot of sense precisely because so many of the RSS feeds are just snippets.

I'd like to avoid the launch time of having my RSS reader launching my browser. No matter how fast the browser loads nothing is faster than the browser already being loaded and ready to go.

The browser could even be configured to pre-fetch the related HTML for the article for those subscriptions that I indicate I'd like handled that way. Not only would I know I had something to read (ie a number on the icon in the dock) but I'd also have the prefetched articles. This would greatly speed up my viewing. RSS is great because it saves me time. A caching browser/reader combo would save me even more.

So keep your web browser running all the time.

The Unix philosophy is to build specialized tools, each of which is optimized to do one thing and do it well, and have these tools interoperate seamlessly.

There's a lot of stuff that you miss if you read the full text in an RSS aggregator, instead of viewing the web page in a browser. None of the layout is preserved. Nor can you view/read/add comments to a weblog entry. I doubt that my blog (which uses MathML for some of its entries) would ever render fully in NetNewsWire.

Indeed, the whole exercise is a bit silly. No one intends RSS to replace (X)HTML. So why would you think that one can simply grab the RSS syndication of a web page and have it be an adequate substitute for the page itself?

In some cases, a full-content RSS feed may turn out to be an adequate substitute. But (one hopes) in most cases, it isn't.

The opposite direction is a bit less obvious. It should be a one-click operation to subscribe to a newsfeed (either in NNW or in Safari) by clicking on a syndication link from the web page.

But, actually, I kinda like the idea of -- at least -- a dockling which displays a list of unread news items in the dock. I also like an easy interface which shows the <description> of each item, so that i can choose whether to load the corresponding web page.

I guess the botom line is: the more ways of getting at some information, the better.

Thank you for introducing me to RSS and NetNewsWire. It has cut the number of sites I visit daily to see if anything new is happening. For many sites I can just look at the headlines and first paragraph in NetNewsWire. If it looks interesting a quick right arrow key and Safari shows me the rest. So on a daily basis, I no longer go directly to MacSlash, SlashDot or, for that matter, Surfin Safari. :)

The big problem is that a number of news sites that I visit do not seem to directly support RSS feeds.

Another application is for chat or club sites: I added an RSS feed to my car club site and changed the scripts so that any news or events that members post are put in the feed. Saves me time as webmaster from checking the site every day: I just have NetNewsWire show me the new stuff.

I got jazzed enough write a PHP program that takes an eBay search string, do the query and then reformat the result as a RSS feed. Now I see any parts for my antique car within an hour (NetNewsWire setting) of when the auction starts. Too bad that eBay does not offer this service themselves. Or if they do I could not find it poking around their site.

Again, thanks for making these possibilities known to me.

I like the concept of XHTML as the syndication format. Why isn't there just some kind of marker you can slip in around each entry (in whatever element happens to surround exactly one entry) to signal aggregators that they've found an entry? And there could even be an option to have alternate stylesheets for the viewers using an aggregator.

Having a .html AND a .rss version of the front of a blog seems to be at odds with the whole world of xml. Why are we doing this? Why isn't there just one xml document (the xhtml) that newsreaders can pick individual stories out of?

If you want full webpages, then download the complete webpage (as in an archive-format that some webbrowsers support for offline-reading)...

I know that most of you are using NetNewsWire, but go have a look at SlashDock (use Google/VersionTracker or get the link from my blog)... SlashDock is one of those programs that just sits there doing it's job, not really something that feels like a program that you actively has to do something with, instead it's more like a simple menu showing you your choices... I love it... =)

If you want full webpages, then download the complete webpage (as in an archive-format that some webbrowsers support for offline-reading)...

I know that most of you are using NetNewsWire, but go have a look at SlashDock (use Google/VersionTracker or get the link from my blog)... SlashDock is one of those programs that just sits there doing it's job, not really something that feels like a program that you actively has to do something with, instead it's more like a simple menu showing you your choices... I love it... =)

While I enjoy the little red "unred counter" in the NetNewsWire dock icon, I would like it better if Safari did the aggregation. Like you mentioned before, there could be an RSS bookmark folder that has links to the feeds you read. Then daugtering the website name lists recent posts. single click to see the post snippet (whole or not) and double-click to open it in a new window or tab (once we get tabs).

Another view option would allow unread articles to be listed in a pane next to the browser window, and clicking on the permalink for the story opens the story in the attached browser page, much like IE's bookmarks/search tabs down the side of the window on OS 9.

This would allow very quick headline scanning and article viewing, especially since the list of headlines wouldn't disappear when you viewed a story. That is how I'd like to see it done.

I don't have much truck with RSS feeds that contain full, non-excerpt HTML. To me, this just seems to miss the point of the value of RSS (to save my time, keep it lean and mean).

Integration of RSS into browser makes sense because both travel over http, port 80 - we're talking about two views of the same web service here, just in different text formats. This is NOT the same as integrating email or usenet into the browser.

It's still nice to have HTML display in the aggregator because one should be able to stick a small image or a bit of text formatting into an excerpt.

If you want to make your users happy, publish an RSS feed. If you want to delight your users, give them the option of getting the full text.

Jacques said above that user's miss a lot of things by reading full text in the RSS reader like comments and site design. I have a few problems with this.

First of all, the textis inherently mostly about words. Words are what RSS does best.

Secondly, for 99% of the sites that I frequent, the design never changes from visit to visit and when it does, the author always posts something about a design change.

Lastly, there is also nothing stopping you from publishing comments in your RSS feed. In fact, I have one feed for each of my blogs (with full entry text only) and then a separate individual entry with comments and Trackbacks, which allows people to subscribe to an individual entry and follow the conversation.

This is an amazing use of RSS, if you ask me, because previously, you had to remember all of the places you commented and then revisit all of them to see if there were any comments. Using individual entry RSS feeds, the comments come to me! It's a shame more sites don't do this.

By the way, has anyone tried embedding a form inside of an RSS feed? Might NetNewsWire be able to take in comments straight from it's interface? I'm going to do a test...

The above should have said "the web is inherently mostly about words". I missed it in my read-over.

Links from the above that were stripped out by Dave's MT install. (grrr. Might want to put a notice for users about stripping out HTML Dave)

Full RSS feeds INCREASE your traffic
http://www.jayallen.org/journey/2003/01/index#rss_spreading_the_words

Publishing individual entry RSS feeds
http://www.jayallen.org/journey/2003/01/index#individual_entry_rss_feeds

Shouldn't it be integrated in Sherlock?
I know that functionnaly Sherlock is to make searches, but technically it is a Web service client/front end, RSS is a king of web service.

P.

I create an RSS 2.0 feed. Each item has three elements, the title, description (as plain text) and the full body of the entry/article as content:encoded, which contains xhtml. Now, once aggregators get a little smarter they should give you the option of what you want to see from each feed on an individual basis.

Right now AmphetaDesk and NetNewsWire show the content:encoded if it exists, and if it doesn't show just the description.

I wish more people would do this instead of try to shoehorn html into the description by encoding everything.

I know that this is off-topic, but it's time for a Safari update. The browser's bugs are starting to get really annoying. It doesn't work with a zillion secure sites requiring log-in, and it's really hard to tell whether it's the browser's fault or the web site's. I'm going to have to switch back to Internet Explorer.

RSS isn't just about reading weblogs (although that is useful) - it's great for just catching headlines from other sources like MacCentral or BBC and Wired News. While weblogs are nice to read in the RSS reader (I, and some other blog publishers, include the 'content' namespace to send a whole entry along with the RSS), that's not the only (nor intended) purpose. A lot of people seem to be thinking otherwise, for better or worse.

If you want to make Safari useful, give me iSync integration with the bookmarks! :) (I've seen a small utility program that promises to sync bookmarks with .Mac called JeepSafari, I haven't checked it out yet though). My latest frustration is seeing interesting articles or sites before leaving for the office, bookmarking them so that I'll get back to them at the office, and then remember that I won't see these bookmarks at said office. It's the Safari teams fault for making bookmark management so nice ;), and the iSync teams fault for letting me achieve a longtime dream (unified calendar, todo, etc).

Sounds like a great idea to integrate RSS into Safari.
An idea might be to have a RSS button in de Bookmarksbar like the Bookmarksbutton under which you can organise your RSS feeds (it'll soon be many) per category in a folder. Easy to quickly get updated on a specific subject. I would like NetNewsWire to have folders with categories my list is already till the center of the earth ;-)

Jan Peeters

Oops, the folder for groups in NNW are already possible... Sorry Ranchero!

'Syndication is not publication. Your syndicated feed is not your home page plus a little, or your home page minus a little, or your home page in plain text. It’s something else, a different medium.'

http://diveintomark.org/archives/2002/11/26/syndication_is_not_publication.html

I need a good RSS Aggregator that will give me full articles, broken out either by day or by site. I'll just write one myself and make it an extension for only Phoenix.

hmmm. I guess for me using the slashdock dockling and a tabbed browser just does exactly what I need.

just from another point of view, I think apple should concentrate on building a good webcore & stuff, so that imaginative small developers, such as NNW's, can improve their applications with added functionality.

I'm in favor of whichever strategy results in the release of WebKit sooner rather than later. :)

I prefer to just right-click on the NetNewsWire Dock icon and see what's new there.

I hope Safari doesn't end up trying to be everything to everybody :(

My blog content *is* my feed -- the HTML is just said feed transformed with a little XSL. However, at the moment I put my full HTML-encoded content in CDATA blocks in the description elements. Mainly this was done because many RSS readers ignore RSS 1.0-style content:encoded elements, and it's all I can do to occasionally find time to write in the blog, let alone craft pithy excerpts.

AmphetaDesk is a nifty perl based dohicky which lets you use your browser for reading RSS feeds. I've been using it for a couple of weeks now and can't see myself going back to any stand-alone proggies any time soon. It's open source, so it could easily be plonked into another project of some kind.