Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: A common syndication format?

Author:Dan Libby
Posted:7/7/1999; 1:36:12 PM
Topic:Syndication formats mailing list
Msg #:8301 (In response to 8055)
Prev/Next:8300 / 8302

There are basically two things that could happen:

1) title is optional. In this case, sites like My Netscape that display title and link only must either: ignore the item, display the raw link, display the first few lines of the item description (is it required?), or display some sort of "title unavailable" text.

2) title is required. This takes care of My Netscape like sites, and places the burden on publishers whose format doesn't lend itself well to providing titles.

However, it seems to me that the publisher, who is closer to the original content, is in a better position to decide the correct title than the receiver, which is a case for making the title be required.

Finally, by way of explanation, the original idea behind RSS was that each link logically corresponded to a page, and each page could be expected to have an associated title. I realize that many publishers have been sending links to weblog-like pages, so this is not always the case.

-dan




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