680 words
I've been proving and RSS feed for more than half a year now and even dropped a few comments on the topic in the meantime. RSS is a handy tool and although I have used it without engaging my brain so far, simply by using whatever came as default in Movable Type and dragging links into NetNewsWire whenever I feel like it, it 'just worked'. That's good news, I guess.
Still, by reading Mark Pilgrim's text on RSS and following a few of the links in it, it seems that within the technical community caring for RSS, there is broadly spread dissent, vanity and other such-like sentiments. In particular people seem to be really protective about the formats and their preferred flavour of them, making it seem as if they were some immense intellectual achievement. I know these are the days where people patent 'ideas' like using XOR
operations to invert black and white images, and RSS may be more complex than that. But from the looks of it, I don't get the impression that a monkey with a typewriter or even a ten year old RealBasic programmer would have come up with something vastly different than the RSS we use and love today when asked to make up a format that represents blog or news items in XML.
To me it seems that an important thing for RSS to become widespread is that it 'just works' – so introducing new versions of the format and bitching about what the different fields mean is a bad idea. Basically it'll mean that many people providing feeds will just add yet another RSS feed to the plethora of feeds they already offer – with hardly anybody understanding what the difference between them is – and aggregator builders will have to make sure their programs work with one more format. Doesn't exactly sound like a win-win situation.
It is important that things continue to work smoothly for the end user. If the RSS format is under-specified, the people who made it up should punch themselves for that and then move on and deal with it by going the way that breaks the RSS experience for the smallest number of people.
Not that I fully understand the gravity of this issue, but concerning the link
vs. guid
issue Mark discusses, clearly the way to go is the way that makes it easy for people to access the article they see in their RSS reader. So, every link that is used when double clicking an item or dragging and dropping it elsewhere to store it for later should be the (perma)link to that entry. Everything else will just be annoying for the user.
While at the topic of permalinks, let me mention that apparently the # symbol is considered a standard symbol to provide the permalink. While I don't see what makes this symbol so outstandingly permalinkish, the scheme seems to work reasonably well. One thing that's completely beyond my comprehension, though, is why many people use a graphic for this symbol while it is part of even the dumbest 7-bit ASCII terminal font. Not only will this raise the common accessibility and scaling and looking-crappy-when-printed issues but it also makes the link much less useful: When dragging a linked image from a browser window to a different application, the result, i.e. whether you drag the image or the link, tends to be a bit unpredictable and vary from application to application – a problem that doesn't exist for text-only links.
The same is true for those ubiquitous and ugly orange graphic based 'XML' logos that people use to indicate the availability of a feed. And while I'm at it, let me ask why exactly people put those little 'XML' icons next to links to other people's blogs? Surely you'd want to look at the blog first before subscribing to its feed. Surely, you don't want to maintain even more links. Surely they're completely superfluous anyway thanks to the autodiscovery magic in RSS readers. It just doesn't make sense – and it's butt ugly.