It’s just data

RSS Best practices: description

Steven Noels and Ugo Cei are discussing XML encoding of descriptions, using one of my feeds as an example.

For starters, I do provide an RSS 0.91 feed with encoded descriptions because that's what many people have grown to expect. But I also provide an RSS 2.0 feed with some added goodies and better conformance to best practices. The descriptions have had their HTML stripped, and the full content is available as content:encoded. Aggregators like aggie do just fine with this.

I have plans to provide a separate excerpt in the future.

Cant one just use the xhtml namespace and not encode the text?

Posted by Rahul Dave at

Rahul, the rss validator will flag such descriptions as errrors. Aggregators today do not expect to find child elements to descriptions. What they expect to find is the equivalent of CDATA.

Posted by Sam Ruby at

mt-xml-smart 1.0 Released.

In the spirit of no-news-is-good-news, I've taken the beta label off of mt-xml-smart my latest MovableType plugin for providing XML encoding and decoding beyond the basic capabilites of MT's native functionality.... [more]

Trackback from tima thinking outloud.

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