Re: [syndication] Re: Ads in RSS

[Dan Lyke <danlyke@flutterby.com>]

Mike Krus writes:
> RSS .92 is about having HTML formating in the description field.
> It's rather pointless without it...

I don't buy it. There are plenty of reasons to have a document summary
without additional formatting in the description field. Think of the
front page of the dead-trees Wall Street Journal (a triumph of
information design) as such a case. Lots of "headline, summary, link
to full article".

Second, the people who did RSS.92 weren't completely braindead. I
think most of the people involved realized that HTML as escaped
entities inside XML is... well... words fail me.

Third, the systems which read my syndication files get pretty anal
about failures, and I've yet to have one complain about not closing my
tags when my text field included an < or similar. So I'd argue that
the major implementations (starting with My.Netscape.com) treat the
field as text.

So in both design and practice, the description field in RSS .92 (and
we've heard from someone on the 1.0 committee) is clearly text.

Dan