Re: [syndication] Re: blogs and syndication

[Julian Bond <julian_bond@voidstar.com>]

In article <20010910150324.A14587@trainedmonkey.com>, Jim Winstead
<jimw-yahoo@trainedmonkey.com> writes
>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.

Or the link/title/abstract/body format.

>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

My approach to this is,

- To have the smallest unit in a blog be an item, not a day.

- To limit the html both incoming and outgoing to my choice of "safe"
tags currently, <A><B><BR><BLOCKQUOTE><CENTER><DD><DL><DT><HR><I><IMG><L
I><OL><P><PRE><U><UL>. Any unclosed tags get stripped as well. This is
my choice and doesn't meet any standards but it is friendly to the RSS
reader. If they want to further strip tags let them, but I'd argue
strongly for retaining <a so that the embedded links don't get lost.

- To shove this html in the <desc> element after escaping characters
that would break XML. This retains any links in the content text.

- To use <link> for the permalink to the content if at all possible.
Some people have a problem with this. I still can't see why. I think
it's as much to do with the blog technology having a hard time
generating a permalink as it is with an argument over whether <link>
should be used for it.   

This preserves as much as possible of the original information while
staying friendly to the unknown destination for the information. This is
all do-able with current blog technology. It breaks 0.91 but only with
the <description> element and in a way that is allowed in 0.92 and is
common anyway.

But then we have <title>. In the main, blog items don't have one. If
they do, it's an irrelevancy. So where does the <title> element get
used? If as an aggregator, I think that the news editor put effort into
a catchy, eyeball grabbing title, I'd always display it. If I'm doing a
condensed display I'd drop the <description> and display just the title.
If there's no title I could synthesize one by taking the first 40 chars
of tag-stripped text and put "..." after it. This works fine on the
condensed display but can look stupid on the full display. Well I'll
just have to make sure it doesn't look stupid!

Now blog tech that creates RSS could do a lot of this for me. 

So why don't they?

-- 
Julian Bond    email: julian_bond@voidstar.com
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