RE: Atom 0.2 feedback

["J. Scott Johnson" <scott@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

+1 for this.  From a search engine perspective, knowing if you have full
content or not is a big deal.

Good idea Ziv.  Thank you.

Scott

On Fri, 2003-08-22 at 05:54, Ziv Caspi wrote:
> Tim Bray writes:
> [...]
> 
> > 3. The 0.2 snapshot is actually less functional than RSS in one
> > important respect.  At 'ongoing' I tend to write really long entries.
> > With RSS 0.2, I can excerpt them in the RSS feed and still (via the
> > horrid escaped-HTML kludge) put hyperlinks and some styling in the
> > excerpt.  Since <summary> doesn't allow markup, I can't do any styling
> > there, right?  So is it OK to put my teaser in <content>, which does
> > allow this, or is the semantic of <content> that the content must be
> > complete?
> 
> Putting a partial content and calling that <content> is the wrong thing to
> do. We really should make it clear that <content> is full content, always.
> 
> The fact that your RSS 2.0 feed (not RSS 0.2! :-) has partial content
> pretending it's full content is a pain for some readers. (Well, it is a pain
> for me.) The reason is that the aggregator doesn't understand that it only
> sees partial content, and so cannot make intelligent decisions on how to
> proceed.
> 
> > At ongoing, if the <description> in the RSS is *not* the full
> > text of the entry, I signal this with a trailing "...".
> 
> Relying on "..." as a visual indicator to human readers that the content is
> partial can only be considered a hack. (For example, if you're an offline
> reader, there's nothing more irritating than seeing those three dots on an
> interesting teaser.)
> 
> What's worse, this is not even standard practice. In many feeds one (machine
> or man) cannot tell by reading the content if it's partial or not.
> 
> Hey, we're in the position to fix that!
> 
> > If we are going
> > to allow non-complete <content> elements should this be made explicit
> > with a full=(yes|no) attribute?
> 
> I suggest we either:
> 1. Have a partial=(yes|no) attribute, with "yes" the default
> 2. Have a different element, called either <teaser> or <excerpt>, which is
> similar to <content>, but indicates that more information can be retrieved
> either by going through to the item's link, or (even better!) by downloading
> an Atom resource from the URL indicated by <link-to-atom>, which contains an
> Atom <entry> with full <content>.
> 
> > Put another way, it seems wrong that the ability to style/markup is
> > coupled to whether or not you want to provide complete content.
> 
> +1
> 
> Ziv Caspi
>   cell: +972-53-668-751
>     web: http://radio.weblogs.com/0106548/
> 
-- 
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J. Scott Johnson, Co-Founder
Feedster, LLC
Making RSS & Weblogs Searchable

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