{"id":374470,"date":"2022-10-20T12:59:46","date_gmt":"2022-10-20T19:59:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/css-tricks.com\/?p=374470"},"modified":"2022-10-20T12:59:47","modified_gmt":"2022-10-20T19:59:47","slug":"instant-articles-proprietary-syndication-user-fidelity-preferences","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/css-tricks.com\/instant-articles-proprietary-syndication-user-fidelity-preferences\/","title":{"rendered":"Instant Articles, Proprietary Syndication, and a Web Built on User Fidelity Preferences"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I love it when there’s a sense of synergy in the blogosphere. First, I caught Nick Heer’s coverage<\/a> of Meta ending support for Instant Articles, its proprietary format for stripped-down performant news articles. He also compares it to the similar demise of AMP, Google’s answer to Instant Articles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then I came across a new one from Chris Coyier<\/a> where he goes on to discuss the big issue with proprietary models of content syndication, whether it’s Meta Instant Articles, Google AMP, or even Apple News:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[T]hat\u2019s the job<\/em> as a publisher: get your content out to as many people as possible. If syndicating into another format is where people are, it\u2019s likely worth doing.<\/p>

[…]<\/p>

If you were a publisher and followed that welp, that\u2019s just our job mentality to provide content wherever people are (which is awfully tempting), now you\u2019re in 4-5 formats already, none of which are terribly \u201cautomatic\u201d. And that\u2019s not counting, ya know, video, audio, social media, and all the other stuff that has become content producers\u2019 jobs.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

If only we had some standard to solve content syndication in a sparse, performant way that doesn’t require the overhead of corporate-driven proprietary formats. Oh wait, we’ve had one forever:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Literally none of the big players I mentioned above were like just give us your RSS feed<\/em>, which, looking back, is a little bananas. RSS solves many of the same problems they were trying to solve […].<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Then there’s what Jim Nielsen shared<\/a> about his work to create a reading experience on his personal blog that emphasizes a user’s preference the “fidelity” of content:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In other words, rather than going to text.npr.org<\/code> when you want a lean experience, you always go to npr.org<\/code> but you set your \u201cfidelity preference\u201d to \u201clow\u201d. In theory, this sends a header to NPR indicating you want a \u201clow fidelity\u201d version of the website, e.g. text-only.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Fidelity
So, now this is part of his blog’s user settings.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Oh my gosh, this a million times! How cool is it for a content-drive site (waves at CSS-Tricks) to not only give users the ability to decide how “rich” of an experience they want, but to do so in a way that leverages the power of HTML to make it happen. Jim’s implementation chugs out different versions of the same article on build:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

.\n\u251c\u2500\u2500 index.html # default\n\u251c\u2500\u2500 _fidelity\/\n    \u251c\u2500\u2500 low\/\n    \u2502    \u2514\u2500\u2500 index.html # text-only\n    \u2514\u2500\u2500 med\/\n        \u2514\u2500\u2500 index.html # minimal<\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\n
Redirects can take care of things once the user makes a choice. Jim has ideas for how to improve the build process so that he doesn’t need to generate JSDOM documents for each article while performing extra work to strip stuff out. But this is a great idea and start!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Three articles within three days that all converge around the same idea, but with different angles, ideas, and solutions. Blogging is cool. (And so is RSS!)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I love it when there’s a sense of synergy in the blogosphere. First, I caught Nick Heer’s coverage of Meta ending support for Instant Articles, its proprietary format for stripped-down performant news articles. He also compares it to the similar demise of AMP, Google’s answer to Instant Articles. Then I came across a new one […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2508,"featured_media":337285,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_topic_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_reply_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"sig_custom_text":"","sig_image_type":"featured-image","sig_custom_image":0,"sig_is_disabled":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"c2c_always_allow_admin_comments":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Instant Articles, Proprietary Syndication, and a Web Built on User Fidelity Preferences by @geoffreygraham","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[4],"tags":[591,1119,18869,1280],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/css-tricks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/03\/website-xray-blueprint.png?fit=1200%2C600&ssl=1","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":245682,"url":"https:\/\/css-tricks.com\/wordpress-apple-news-instant-articles-amp\/","url_meta":{"origin":374470,"position":0},"title":"From WordPress to Apple News, Instant Articles, and AMP","date":"September 19, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"I managed to get CSS-Tricks publishing to Apple News (example link), Instant Articles (example link), and AMP (example link). The linked up article is a writeup of how that all works, starting with this self-hosted WordPress site. Feel free to yell at me for promoting walled gardens and ruining the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Link"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":352279,"url":"https:\/\/css-tricks.com\/what-is-your-page-title-on-a-google-search-engine-results-page\/","url_meta":{"origin":374470,"position":1},"title":"What is Your Page Title on a Google Search Engine Results Page?","date":"September 23, 2021","format":false,"excerpt":"Whatever Google wants it to be. I always thought it was exactly what your  element was. Perhaps in lieu of that, what the first <h1> on the page is. 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Even among those who had heard of it, the vibe was mostly: \"this is\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Article"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/css-tricks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/02\/google-amp-pattern.jpg?fit=1200%2C600&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":342237,"url":"https:\/\/css-tricks.com\/the-possibilities-of-syndication\/","url_meta":{"origin":374470,"position":4},"title":"The Possibilities of Syndication","date":"June 11, 2021","format":false,"excerpt":"That's the one word that isn't an adjective in the acronym RSS. Really Simple Syndication. Update: Lol there are literally two mistakes there. RSS is an initialism not an acronym, and \"Really\" is an adverb not an adjective. RSS isn't just about RSS readers. 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Malte Ubl: Based on what we learned from AMP, we now feel ready to take\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Article"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/css-tricks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/02\/google-amp-pattern.jpg?fit=1200%2C600&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/css-tricks.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/374470"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/css-tricks.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/css-tricks.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/css-tricks.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2508"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/css-tricks.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=374470"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/css-tricks.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/374470\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":374633,"href":"https:\/\/css-tricks.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/374470\/revisions\/374633"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/css-tricks.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/337285"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/css-tricks.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=374470"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/css-tricks.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=374470"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/css-tricks.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=374470"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}