(2003-06-12) Rss Aggregator Context

Had dinner with some folks last night. When Anil Dash decried the quality of all the RssAggregator-s out there, Jason Shellen, Joel Spolsky, and I all said we want our sites read in their native habitat, because we think about Context and don't want our readers to lose it. I think down the road we'll use an RssAggregator as part of our Universal Inbox to bring some unifying logic to all the stuff we're tracking. But it will still make some sense to jump to the source to read the individual bits. (On the other hand, scanning news headlines via aggregator makes lots of sense.)

• In 2005 this is still an issue for any Wiki.

Mark Pilgrim has a great piece on "how to consume RSS safely" (which applies to HTML forms also). If you're going to go to the source-site for fulltext reading, then stripping everything probably makes sense. Well, except maybe ul/li/b/i but then you still have to look out for style attributes maybe... (gee, this sounds like SpamWars combined with Security)