intertwingly

It’s just data

Ghosts of RSS past


To explore the future, one needs to understand the past.

In the beginning, items in RSS 0.90 had only titles and links.  Items in today's RSS feed for scripting.com has neither.  Where's the continuity in that?

The answer to this question is that RSS 2.0's primary author, Dave Winer, has consistently demonstrated that he fundamentally understands that data outlives code.  Not be a little, but by a lot.  And not sometimes, but always.

Case in point: consider that while scripting.com's RSS feed has neither a  title nor a link, every aggregator out there supports both title and link.  And will for the foreseeable future.

Why guid instead of link?  It turns out that link has been used rather ambiguously over time.  In some feeds the link points to the article the item discusses.  On others it points to the item itself.  Which is right?

There are plenty of other areas of ambiguity.  Can description contain HTML?  If it can contain HTML, can any hypertext links contained therein be relative?  If they can be relative, what should they be relative too?

How do you correct "bad" link tags and descriptions?  You don't.  They will exist forever.  The best you can do is to provide a more constrained, predictable, and reliable alternative.

I propose that hypertext links inside of xhtml:body can be relative.  And that they are be evaluated relative to the URL of the RSS feed itself (as opposed to, say, the value of the /rss/channel/link element).  Towards that end, I'm hereby publicly challenging Don Box to work with me to help formally document the usage of the xhtml:body element in the context of an RSS 2.0 feed.  Others that wish to participate are, of course, welcome to do so