[timconstan]

Originally Posted by hacker

RSS will never work on a PDA anyway, because it was never designed to. RSS feeds always lead to the full-size version of the article (thats precisely the point, to draw traffic to the site hosting the article(s) in question, and thus advertising revenue).

Since there is no real benefit to having a "clipped" front page of news summaries, which lead to the full-size article content anyway, it is wasteful and unnecessarily large when viewed on PDA or cellphone devices.

The point of NewsMob to make RSS work on a PDA. RSS feeds only lead to the full-size version of the of the article if the user clicks (taps) on the link taking them to the full-size version. With NewsMob a user can select an alternative link which e-mails them a reminder, then when they're back on their desktop, they can view the full-size version - or maybe the user will gain all the information they need to from the RSS feed itself without needing to or wanting to read the entire article. A person can read the headlines and first paragraph of all the articles in a newspaper and walk away fairly informed and satisfied. In fact I don't know anyone who feels the need to go beyond this for every article.

Some RSS feeds only provide the article title and this is, I agree, is pretty useless. Some others provide all the content you need (NewsMob's Weather RSS feeds are an example of this).

Originally Posted by hacker

Until they devise a way to clip-and-strip the full-size page for PDA or mobile accessibility (thereby removing advertising revenue, not a good idea), these kinds of services are just a fad. The technology just doesn't allow for proper propagation of the article content.

You can call it a fad, band-aid, whatever. The fact of the matter is it works now. No doubt in the long-run there will be a better solution, but in the long-run we're all dead.

But then again, this is largely in part because most web designers building these sites don't know how to make sites forward-compatible, coded against standards, using WAI compliance. It takes a level of discipline that most "web developers" (and I use that term very loosely) are lazy and lack the knowledge or experience to properly implement the right approach.

We'll get there eventually, but it will require some learning on the part of the web developers who are consistently building these monolithically-large sites full of inaccessible content.

I hope you're right, and I'm sure new screen technolgies will also play a part in meeting this divide between content and the mobile user, but for now, there's NewsMob.

- Tim