Re: [syndication] Re: Ads in RSS

[Jim Winstead <jimw-yahoo@trainedmonkey.com>]

On Thu, Mar 15, 2001 at 12:44:59PM -0800, Dan Lyke wrote:
> 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".

rss 0.92 isn't just about summaries. and the spec clearly says
that entity-encoded html is allowed in the description.

http://backend.userland.com/rss092#allSubelementsOfLtitemgtAreOptional

title and link aren't even required in 0.92, which makes it a
reasonable format for syndicating diary-style-weblog content.

(or for sites like slashdot.org or kuro5hin.org, where the
'description' can quite reasonably contain additional links.
of course, right now slashdot doesn't include descriptions in
the rss feed, and kuro5hin just strips out its markup.)

> 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.

except, in practice, manila sites produce rss 0.91 files that
include encoded html in the description element. for example:

  http://newsfeeds.manilasites.com/xml/rss.xml
  http://doc.weblogs.com/xml/rss.xml

heck, there's even sites that don't encode the html:
  http://www.theregister.co.uk/tonys/slashdot.rdf

(is entity-encoding the html the right approach? probably not.
but it is simple, and there are examples out there to follow.
i'm sure rss 1.0 would support this with some sort of namespace
magic, but i don't know of any examples.)

jim