River of NewsClips
While I am a fan of full-content feeds, bandwidth heavy approaches are not always appropriate. As such, I’ve begun experimenting with producing summary pages which limit the length of each entry, and make other changes such as replacing images with links.
As an example, here a summary of the OPML top 100, the blogosphere’s equivalent of pop culture.
HTML formatting is preserved. Elements that have their content elided are properly closed.
Images that specify alt="" are omitted. Otherwise, images are replaced by the value of their alt tags. Images that don’t specify an alt tag (for shame!) are replaced with the text <img>. Images that are not already enclosed by a link have the alt text linked to the image.
There still is more work to be done. For example, it may make sense to provide a more fine control over which feed element is to be taken as the basis for the summary. This isn’t standardized in RSS 2.0, and usage varies.
I’m not happy yet with the Atom feed produced - some entries should be summary only, and some others should be content only. Both the summary and content should only appear when they are different.