Raw

Sam Ruby gamely responded to my comments re. inserting xhtml in RSS :



Update your RSS 1.0 feed, and I'll update mine…

Thing is, I don't actually need to update my feed because the content is at a URL :

<item rdf:about="http://Danny Ayers.com/archives/001059.html">

This is what you get with the default template in Movable Type.

The feed isn't perfect, but this isn't entirely the fault of MT. The <description> is the first line or so of the content rather than being a description of the content. There is an additional problem when the item is talking about content at a remote URL - this should be the rdf:about URI, but the feed points to the archive file. There is also the little matter of what the <link> element is meant to point to.

Most of the issues spring from the use of RSS for feeds from blogs, where the content often isn't remote.

Personally I think the RSS 1.0 working group really need to spend time looking the usage patterns that have evolved over the past couple of years.

(I've yet to see an adequate description of how the item URI should be generated if the item content is within the feed, or why the <link> element is mandatory).

I'm pretty certain that a lot of these are covered somewhere in the specs, so by deal with I mostly mean document them in a manner that makes life easy for tool builders.

The Userland approach to specs is in many ways reprehensible, but the back-of-envelope style docs means people aren't put off by apparent complexity.

Sam Ruby: xhtml in rss 2.0

[Danny Ayers]