Re: [syndication] Re: blogs and syndication

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

On Tue, Sep 11, 2001 at 08:32:32AM +0100, Julian Bond wrote:
> 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!

well, i think it could be argued that a rss display tool that wanted
to display a 'compact' view of an item that had a description but not
a title should just create the title as you suggest, and when
displaying the non-compact view, just show the item (and not the fake
title).

(fwiw, the rss 0.93 feed i produce for my site has items with just
description, link, and pubDate elements. at least a few people seem to
be subscribed to the feed. i guess that radio handles feeds like that
okay, although i would suspect it doesn't actually use the link when
there's no title.)

jim