Mobile RSS Feeds: Obvious eh?
Posted on June 9, 2006
Filed Under /dev/null/ | 88 views |
THERE IS OBVIOUSLY a need for a version of RSS news feeds that will work on mobile phones. Ideally it would be a news ticker that scrolls across your handset’s default (idle) screen.
That would make it easier for news organisations to port their existing feeds to mobile devices. Don’t forget, there are way more mobile phones than PCs out there.
As someone who’s been working with RSS for a few years now I’d have to say “Obvious? Really? In what way?” I was under the impression that RSS was a text-based mark-up standard that put no limitations or demands on display or presentation. So what exactly is is about RSS that’s currently preventing mobile devices from using it? It is, after all, just plain ol’ text, which the author seems to miss since his argument for a new version is based on presentation rather than structure.
If someone wants to create a Java-based RSS ticker for mobile phones I can’t think of anything in the current spec that would make doing so impossible. In fact, there already seems to be a pretty healthy market for mobile-based RSS readers.
Perhaps the real story here is the author and his proposal that DoCoMo’s i-channel be that spec. A quick Googling of “Tony Dennis” DoCoMo show’s he’s been a pretty strong DoCoMo fanboy for years, since at least 2003. I smell something funny in the newsworthyness of this “story”….
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