Why I don't like RSS!

RSS has its advantages in terms of updating readers on new stories, only dloading the latest posts for a blog, enabling all the content to be automagically downloaded onto a newsreader, etc etc.

My argument here is however that there is something special about each individual site that helps to separate one news story/one view from another. I gave RSS a try with blogs like Engadget but was turned off instantly when I discovered that no picture comes through. The blandness of the RSS reader put me off (Sage using Firefox) and therefore I switched back to just saving all the blogs as bookmarks and then using firefox to open all the bookmarks at once.

This also brings me onto a point about bookmarks. It would be an excellent addition to enable through the RSS link to highlight the bookmarks you have that have changed or updated since you last looked at the page. This would mean that you could then only open the pages that you know have been changed.

If I was to switch to RSS permanently I would hope to see 2 things. One - a better range of devices that can view these XML based pages... Such as a RSS loader for the PSP or a special RSS Viewer in Java for mobile phones...and secondly I would like to see style info being added like CSS to each RSS file so that it could look like the site of origin but still give the advantages of the traditional page view. If these two things were widely used then I guess this would finally switch me over to RSS.