Felix Salmon has a post up lamenting the fact that of those websites which do provide RSS content syndication, only a few provide the entire post’s contents; most provide just the headline and a short summary.

As usual, it is a pleasure to point out why Felix is wrong when he carps about matters technological. Today, he is wrong on two counts:

1. As an alternative to the “traditional” method of scanning news and blogs — manually visiting every site on your bookmarks list to see if anything’s been updated — an RSS newsfeed reader offers a double advantage: It can alert you to updated content by regularly downloading feeds and checking them for new material, and it can do so using little bandwidth, since RSS feeds are short and sweet — at least until Felix has his way with the poor things. Turn your RSS feed into a full-content behemoth and you lose one of the two reasons for using it, because a feed with 15 supersized items surely outweighs a typical 10-post blog index pageThe only reason MemeFirst has the full content of posts in its RSS feed is because of Felix’s badgering.. NetNewsWire for the Mac checks every feed every half-hour by default; If these are of the obese variety, you might as well be downloading the index page of every website in your shortcut list instead.

But Felix has an all-you-can-eat broadband account, so why not give him the option, like 456 Berea Street does, to pile up plate after plate if he’s already paid for it? For popular websites, the answer is simple: It would cost too much to have hundreds of thousands of newsfeed readers demanding the entire recent contents of the site every half hour. But there is an additional reason…

2. Why try to read a newsfeed item inside a newsreader at all, where you cannot reference the cascading style sheet that goes with it? Unless the content is limited to pure text, it will always look worse, possibly even unintelligibleTake, for example, the marginalia on my blog. It is text inside <span> tags within the body of a regular post, and it is shifted left using CSS style attributes. Lose the instructions implicit in the style sheet, and this text is just squashed in between what I write here to the right.. The one compelling reason is that it saves bandwidth. But we’ve already shown Felix to be a gleeful guzzler of that commodity. It’s as if he wants to downgrade his blogreading experience.

Actually, my suspicion is that Felix is just annoyed at having to go through the extra step of clicking on a permalink and switching to a browser whenever the summary proves intriguing or just plain mystifying. The solution to this problem is not to demand full-content RSS feeds, but to switch to a newsreader that automatically fetches and renders inline the permalinked post, HTML/CSS and all, with comments, and on demand. In the case of OS X, that’s easy — you just appropriate the Safari engine, and this is exactly what Shrook has done. The current version, 1.33, does it very nicely, but the preview for 2.0 (which expires March 9) takes newsreading to a whole new level.

For me, Shrook 2 will finally wean me off hunting and pecking through my bookmarks for new content. And it will free Felix from the Sisyphean task of getting people to change their RSS feeds to please his quirky palate; instead, he will now be able to focus on the far more noble cause of getting people to provide RSS feeds in the first place — preferably dainty ones.