RSS Best Practices
Brent,
Phil,
and Ben
are discussing whether RSS feeds should have relative or absolute
URLs in encoded HTML. This has bothered me in the past,
particularly when viewing Joel On Software's RSS feed through
the lens of the Radio Aggregator. His feed has a number of
instances of <a href="news/...> and
<IMG src="pictures/...">. Is it
valid RSS?
Absolutely! Does it provide the greatest value to the
widest possible audience? Well, perhaps it could be improved
a little. And perhaps the aggregators can do better too.
There probably are a number of things which are quite legal RSS,
but are less than neighborly. For example, a
<script> tag. Or a
<meta> tag. Or
an <embed> tag. Or an
<object> tag. You get the picture.
What I would like to do is to have the greater community
discuss this for a few days, and then Mark and I will implement
it in the RSS
validator. As always, validation and compliance will be
completely voluntary. We will clearly separate errors from
warnings. In fact, we will provide an option to not see the
warnings at all, if that is your preference.