Immediate Articles, Proprietary Syndication, and a Net Constructed on Person Constancy Preferences | CSS-Tips

I like it when there’s a way of synergy within the blogosphere. First, I caught Nick Heer’s protection of Meta ending help for Immediate Articles, its proprietary format for stripped-down performant information articles. He additionally compares it to the same demise of AMP, Google’s reply to Immediate Articles.

Then I got here throughout a brand new one from Chris Coyier the place he goes on to debate the massive problem with proprietary fashions of content material syndication, whether or not it’s Meta Immediate Articles, Google AMP, and even Apple Information:

[T]hat’s the job as a writer: get your content material out to as many individuals as attainable. If syndicating into one other format is the place persons are, it’s possible price doing.

[…]

When you had been a writer and adopted that welp, that’s simply our job mentality to supply content material wherever persons are (which is very tempting), now you’re in 4-5 codecs already, none of that are terribly “computerized”. And that’s not counting, ya know, video, audio, social media, and all the opposite stuff that has change into content material producers’ jobs.

If solely we had some customary to unravel content material syndication in a sparse, performant manner that doesn’t require the overhead of corporate-driven proprietary codecs. Oh wait, we’ve had one eternally:

Actually not one of the large gamers I discussed above had been like simply give us your RSS feed, which, trying again, is slightly bananas. RSS solves lots of the similar issues they had been making an attempt to unravel […].

Then there’s what Jim Nielsen shared about his work to create a studying expertise on his private weblog that emphasizes a person’s choice the “constancy” of content material:

In different phrases, slightly than going to textual content.npr.org once you need a lean expertise, you at all times go to npr.org however you set your “constancy choice” to “low”. In principle, this sends a header to NPR indicating you need a “low constancy” model of the web site, e.g. text-only.

Oh my gosh, this 1,000,000 occasions! How cool is it for a content-drive web site (waves at CSS-Tips) to not solely give customers the flexibility to determine how “wealthy” of an expertise they need, however to take action in a manner that leverages the ability of HTML to make it occur. Jim’s implementation chugs out completely different variations of the identical article on construct:

.
├── index.html # default
├── _fidelity/
    ├── low/
    │    └── index.html # text-only
    └── med/
        └── index.html # minimal

Redirects can handle issues as soon as the person makes a alternative. Jim has concepts for how you can enhance the construct course of in order that he doesn’t have to generate JSDOM paperwork for every article whereas performing additional work to strip stuff out. However it is a nice thought and begin!

Three articles inside three days that every one converge across the similar thought, however with completely different angles, concepts, and options. Running a blog is cool. (And so is RSS!)