2 entries tagged alleged and rss

RSS 0.91 experiments

I have created an experimental RSS feed (‘channel’) for this site. In principle this can be used by people with RSS aggregators to mix my latest headlines in with other channels.

The documentation for RSS I am using is Dave Winer’s, because he is one of the few people to actually document it. Erm, except that I have taken the liberty of adding an XML namespace attribute (using the namespace mentioned in an article about RSS 1.0).

I am using the description field to hold (part of) the first paragraph, by way of a teaser; readers are expected to follow the link to read the thing in full. I was a little surprised to discover that RSS 0.91 has no provision for supplying a date for news items. For weblog-style channels, this seems like a major omission!

I also really dislike the RSS-0.91 de-facto convention of using escaped HTML text as the value of titles and descriptions. For one thing, why not just embed HTML as-is instead of under an extra layer of encoding? (That’s the whole point of XML namespaces, for example...) Worse, many people just grab the first 100, say, characters, regardless of whether decoding the result will be valid HTML or not! This means that you cannot safely use XSLT to transform RSS 0.91 to HTML, unless I am missing something... Anyway, in my feed I am making a point of stripping out all mark-up before adding to the RSS file. People who want to see it formatted will have to follow the link!

Namespaces annoyances in RSS

In an earlier note I listed four namespaces used in RSS and RSS for the same element names. One of these has now been unmade: the RSS specification never explicitly mentioned the namespace, but the sample file included an xmlns attribute. While I was away in Canada, this was removed to ensure backward compatibility with RSS 0.91. This makes sense (there exist examples of applications that genuinely are broken by this), but is kind of icky.

There is still the old RSS 0.9 format—which did use its own namespace—but given that even RSS 1.0 did not preserve that, I think we can assume it is dead too. I assume that the programs that were broken by the fleeting addition of the RSS-2.0 namespace are also incapable of parsing RSS-1.0 data?

I just tried printing a copy of the RSS 2.0 spec., but because he chose to use a fixed-width table for the text, it is clipped all down the right-hand side of the page, making it useless. Goddammit!

Update (2002-10-14): I have removed the namespace declaration from my experimental RSS feed.