At Sat, 23 Jan 2010 23:54:54 +0000, Adam Bower wrote:
On Sat, Jan 23, 2010 at 10:39:51PM +0000, Richard Lewis wrote:
Yes, and if RSS were as important as email then browser based feed readers would be just as evil and wrong as webmail.
That doesn't make sense, given that the context of an rss feed is that it is a way of aggregating and displaying (generally) content from the web so having an rss feed reader that is accessed from a web browser is perfectly sensible.
I don't quite agree with the "(generally)" here. In my experience, RSS feeds are often used to publish things like events information which isn't necessarily published elsewhere on the Web. Such uses are just as, or even more important than aggregating content published elsewhere on the Web. (But maybe I'm just expanding what was contained in your "(generally)".)
As email isn't part of the web, as it's erm, well email. So using the web to read email is /slightly/ less sane but does make sense in that you don't have to configure an email client locally each time you want to read email so it still kinda works (but not as nicely as having a properly configured email client).
I should admit that, just a few days previously, I'd had to help a student who'd been trying to email lecture code exmples to himself using HTML encoded email with the Hotmail Web interface and had got in quite a pickle trying to get the code into his editor. So maybe I was being a bit biased.
Best, Richard