RSS feeds for reading mode

Reader mode tries to reconstruct a story from messy HTML. Feeds already ship the story in a clean wrapper. In 2017 I wrote a tiny note, “RSS Feeds for Reading Mode,” asking: what if the browser preferred the site’s feed as the canonical clean version? 📡👇

Found it while combing my old notes from April 15, 2017. Context then: Safari/Firefox reader views were mainstream, AMP was rising, Google Reader was gone, and JSON Feed was days away. The question I scribbled: could reader view defer to the site’s feed?

Why it felt promising: many RSS/Atom feeds include full text (content:encoded), stable permalinks, and metadata. Flow: discover rel=alternate, fetch, match by URL/guid, render in a standard template. Fewer DOM heuristics (Readability, Mercury). The catch: plenty of feeds are summaries, HTML can be broken, paywalls and canonicals drift, pagination/media vary, and some publishers throttle or kill feeds.

2017→2025: Feeds persisted (and JSON Feed 1.1 landed). Chrome reintroduced Follow/Web Feed. Reader views kept improving with summary layers. Extraction still dominates because it’s universal when feeds are absent or wrong. Pragmatic path: hybrid - prefer verified full‑text feeds when confidence is high, otherwise fall back to parser extraction, with summaries as hints, not substitutes.

My takeaways: favor publisher structure but verify, treat feeds as transport, not design, respect canonicals and policies, always keep a parser fallback. Open questions:

1. A standard reader endpoint or feed extension for sanitized article DOM?
2. Can feeds carry typography/media/ads policy that reader modes honor?
3. Does AI reduce the need for standards or increase it?

Here’s the original note from 2017: https://github.com/AnandChowdhary/notes/blob/main/notes/2017/rss-feeds-for.md