Re: [syndication] Re: blogs and syndication

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

On Mon, Sep 10, 2001 at 08:35:16PM -0000, Bill Kearney wrote:
> But what ever happened to just using the RSS feed as a teaser or 
> pointer to the real stuff?

the problem is that for many weblogs, the content they want to
syndicate (or people want to syndicate from them) doesn't tend to fall
into the link/title/plain-text-description format. the format of an
'item' on many weblogs is one or more paragraphs. there almost always
is no 'title'. there may not be a link. there may be more than one
link. the links probably go somewhere off-site from the weblog.  there
may be a permanent location for the weblog item (so that others can
point to it from their weblogs). there may be a link to a discussion
area for the item.

rss isn't very good at describing this sort of item. the only way i've
seen that is even remotely workable is to not produce a link and title
(meaning rss 0.92), and encode the item as html in the description
(primarily to preserve the links and splitting paragraphs, and perhaps
some basic formatting). (even then, what do you do to provide the
permalink or to link to a discussion area? embed it in the
description? use the link element and generate a lame title like
metafilter.com[1] does?)

jim

[1] http://xml.metafilter.com/rss.xml