Franc Zabkar wrote:

What does it do for the end-user that viewing a simple web-page
doesn't do?

How does it convey information (text, graphics, images, etc)
differently vs a web browser?

You've essentially answered your own question. There are no "simple"
web-pages.

An RSS feed reader presents articles in a format which is very similar
to that which I consider ideal, namely the plain-text, no frills
format that I'm using right now. Contrast this to the bloated,
convoluted, ad-infested, Javascript based web forums such as
Seagate's, Western Digital's, and Tom's Hardware.

When you say "articles", I would have assumed you meant media or news
stories. Items that you might read in a magazine or newspaper.

I generally don't have a problem with web-forums being overly complex or
bloated - possibly because of my very liberal use of HOSTS file entries.

Here is a typical forum page:

http://forums.seagate.com/t5/Barracu...d-p/ata_drives

I opened that page in my browser (firefox 2.0.0.20) and did a little
detective work. I then added the following lines to my hosts file:

127.0.0.1 stx.i.lithium.com
127.0.0.1 nexus.ensighten.com
127.0.0.1 metrics.seagate.com
127.0.0.1 cdn.clicktale.net

And I added "forums.seagate.com" to the list of sites that my
"YesScript" firefox add-on blocks from running scripts.

I then started "DuMeter" just to get a total bytes transfered between my
computer and the internet for a test to see how much data is involved in
rendering the above web-page. (I made sure no other processes were
running that talk to the interet during this test).

So with the above entries in my hosts file, the numbers a

Downloaded: 27.1 kb
Uploaded: 1.8 kb
Total: 28.9 kb

Next, I renamed my hosts file (so it would play no role in blocking web
requests) and re-loaded the above web-page (I did not remove the seagate
entry in YesScript, however):

Downloaded: 65.5 kb
Uploaded: 7.8 kb
Total: 73.4 kb

So I reduced by more than 50% the amount of data that was transfered to
render the above seagate web-page. There appeared to be no difference
(visually speaking) between the two versions.

Here is an RSSOwl screenshot:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...Rssowl_big.gif

It sort-of makes that web-forum look like what I see with Netscape
Navigator when I'm reading / posting to usenet.

My strategy for improving my web-experience is to start with the MVPS
hosts file and then build on it by looking closely at what my most
frequented web-sites are doing as far as accessing tracking /
user-metrics and advertising servers, and then adding those machines to
my hosts file.

This works not only for web-forums, but ALL web-content that I happen to
browse to.

I've even gone beyond the hosts file by having a web-server (Abyss)
operating on my machine, serving up a selected set of script files that
I find are commonly accessed by many websites. These are mostly ajax
and jquery script files. I download these scripts, decompress them,
look for "irritating" external references (facebook, twitter, etc) and
remove them, and then serve them up to my browser as dictated by my
hosts file.

I think I have something like 20 lines in my hosts file devoted just to
blocking access to various facebook servers. Maybe a dozen for google's
various ad-servers.

So that's my solution for removing the internet crud from my
web-experience.