via Bill de hra | One-Click HTML

Bill de h?ra: Should we solve one-click subscription by turning the HTML off

So my answer to clicksub - don`t start from there. Instead this would be great: at some point weblogs flip over and the HTML website bits will become secondary fluff to the XML content, like how PDFs are secondary web fluff to HTML today. The frontpage would be the feed, the archives would be Atom entries, and instead of a "subscribe to the feed" buttons, you could have "read this stuff in a browser" buttons. And reading this stuff in browser would be retro-cool in a Harris tweed sports jacket kind of way - you could use Lynx at tech conferences to read weblogs and get some respect for keeping it real. It would be strictly for the weekends. Otherwise, no more handwringing about one-click subscriptions - if you got here, you`re already subscribed.

You know, the idea has merit... All of the content and the "quickview" navigation on this blog is done via rendering the Atom feeds for each section via client-side XSLT anyway. So its not difficult to do, it would just have to be done in a way that makes it easy to make it the default behavior for a given site on the web. In fact, as long as the data feeds are valid that`s one Greasemonkey script that would pretty much be guaranteed not to break.

If I could find about 4 or 5 hours I could finish off the "Asset-based AspectXML" project I`ve been working on which may not make complete sense at the moment, but if you think of everything on a website as an asset, and then store each of those assets as an entry in an atom feed I think you`ll be quite amazed at what you can do with such a set-up.

I`ll see what I can do to get that finished and posted ASAP.