To answer your question of what makes an RSS entry better than a standards based site with CSS turned off: The RSS entry has all the crap removed from it on the server-side while the standards-based page serves up the crap but attempts to hide it client-side with CSS (or by absence of CSS/JS).

Part of the reason I wrote that entry was to help dispel the notion that using purely CSS, you can manipulate content dramatically enough to where it’s ideal for disabled people and/or ideal for mobile devices. We now know that many screenreaders don’t really read code per se… but rather read what they see on the screen. And mobile devices don’t deal with CSS very well yet either.

So my solution basically says, why try and hide crap with CSS when you can just not serve the crap to begin with (much like what RSS does).

Because you’re right, Mike, RSS for 99 percent of the people out there is a server-side solution based off of template-driven architectures. If that’s the case, making the content portion of any page RSSized should be easy as adding xml to your url.

And so why couldn’t we just manipulate those templates so that it adds a list of navigation points to each entry? Google is putting ads in there, why not links to other RSSized pages? If your non-web-based RSS reader is set as the default (and especially if it’s Tiger’s Safari), it should be a seamless experience to go from the about RSS page to the news RSS page to the RSS page that contains your current contact information or even the RSS page of other RSS feeds on your site.

Obviously, that MIGHT be getting a little crazy, but never say never. My big wonder, though, is what makes an RSS page better than a standard’s based site with CSS turned off? Maybe the solution might be reversing the flow of humane text filters like Markdown and Textile so they turn HTML into human-readable documents that screen readers would love to chomp down on. To see some of that in action check here:

http://www.aaronsw.com/2002/html2text/

I’m proposing basically the same thing: abstract your content out well enough so that you can publish similarly bare pages for people with special needs or mobile devices.

The problem with “RSS” as a solution for this is that RSS is best used as a notification technology. I.E.: “There is new content you should see and here’s the gist of it”. It’s not really meant to be navigable at all, as a web site is.

Think about an application like SalesForce.com, RSS in its current form cannot handle it.

RSS as means to replace washingpost.com, that is fine. A little XSL and an add-on to tell the browser not to read the HTML but instead auto discover the feed and you are set.

As an alternative content system, its only starting to have an impact outside early adopters (aside: RSS early adopters have been early for like, 4-5 years …).

But as OSs build RSS deeper into their core, including their browsers, the alternative delivery method, and the abstraction from primary design will be sitting right there.