CSS Styles in RSS Content #2

Good friend Aaron Swartz disagrees with my position on CSS Styles in RSS Content:

Inevitably, what a lot of people fail to remember is that just because we did things one way in the past, doesn't mean we need to do them that way in the future. Our computers are not bound to physical metaphors like our VCRs, newspapers, or traditional media. Allowing people to add an optional additional feature doesn't hurt things for anyone else, it just makes things better for those who want to take advantage of that option.

To which I respond:

Blog authors seem to request this feature far more than blog readers because it lets them brand their content (seemingly because their content doesn't have a "voice" of its own) - aggregator users seem to want only the content (as "turn it off!" was an oft-requested reply on Brent's page). Others would not benefit from its existence (as others suggested that they use NNWL as merely a notifier, not a reader).

Obviously, most blog authors are blog readers, but the request for said feature seems to more frequently come from a desire to style "my" content. As aggregators get more and more popular, and feed watchlists get larger and larger (50+), the cacophony of different styles will not readily indicate one blog any more than a simple, already supported, logo could.

He didn't believe my second paragraph though, firing back that possible confusion and dilution of styles "certainly doesn't seem to be true of websites and there are far more of those." Never willing to shut up, we eventually decided that we were approaching the problem from different types of aggregators in the first place:

Me: Those are autonomous windows in your browser, be they tabs or not. Taking fifty styling's based solely on title/description/author and smashing them all together on one "page" - you think they'd still stand out? I guess this comes down to what style of aggregator you like - a stylized three pane aggregator makes a fair bit of sense, since the extra click/movement to load an entitled site associates the style with it.

Him: Ah yeah. I don't think it makes much sense for one-page aggregators.

Funnily enough, Brent followups with "Since posting the other day about RSS and style sheets-making it so people could create a style sheet to use with their feeds-I've come to learn that people hate the idea. Fine by me!"