Scott Rosenberg: "...for the wider world of Salon's readers and beyond, RSS remains a novelty worth introducing with a fanfare." That may be, though we think Scott's criticism is the most interesting part of his piece at Salon:
RSS needs a better colloquial name. And easier, more intuitive interfaces for aggregators. And a simpler method for subscribing to feeds (right now you need to copy the URL from one of those increasingly ubiquitous orange "XML" buttons on a site -- if you click on the button, you'll just get raw XML in your browser, which confuses novice users no end).
Of course, there are ways to (1) make RSS more useful and attractive in the browser, and (2) automatically subscribe to feeds, though we recognize the latter as software-specific. Feeds like Dave Shea's -- which is styled using CSS and XSL, and which provides help to new users within the feed itself -- go a long way to ease at least one of Scott's concerns. Our only concern is that aggregators, too, will recognize and display styles, though we've no specific reason to believe this behavior exists. We'd prefer not to trade one usability issue (unstyled RSS in the browser) for another (unpredictable styling of RSS in the aggregator).