| Arrrrrrgg! Right that's got that out of the way. There's some confusion about the proper use of Link in an item in an RSS feed. As a developer my approach to this is to look at a)the spec, b)examples and c)the market, ie what does everyone else do. So let's try that. a)0.91 " A channel may contain any number of <item>s, each of which links to a story, with an optional description. <link> is the URL of the story. Maximum length is 500.". Looks like a permalink to me. 0.92. "Why? When a RSS file reflects the content of a weblog or "blog" site, the structure required by previous versions of RSS was often impossible to synthesize. For example, there is no actual limit on the number of links a weblog item can have." Oh dear. How can a weblog item have more than one link? Only if we're referring to links embedded in the description. 2.0 "link The URL of the item. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/07/movies/07FEST.html". Looks like a permalink to me. 1.0 "5.5.2 <link> The item's URL. " looks like a permalink to me b)So how about the examples. 0.92 has no item links but in the other two every single example of link is a permalink. In the 1.0 example, every item link is a permalink. c) So far so good with one exception. Looking at the marketplace, every single example feed I can find that has a link uses the link as the permalink. So regardless of what the specs say, the de facto standard is to use link for the permalink of the item. I'm sure there's a counter example out there somewhere, but I can't find it. So in all this I can only find two sources of confusion, the 0.92 spec and various comments from Dave Winer. And I find most of his comments on this subject to be ambiguous even when they're trying to clarify what was meant. What bugs me is that 0.92 spec. Everywhere else it seems completely clear that link should be the permalink where possible. But this comment on the reason for making link optional makes it seem as though that wasn't the intention at all. Given the overwhelming evidence, I'm forced to conclude that Dave is wrong and the rest of the world is right (on this point) which is problematic when he wrote three of the specs. Back to Mark Pilgrim's latest stunt of leaving out link in favour of guid. I have to just quote Mark's words back to him. "LEAVE RSS ALONE!" The core of RSS, going all the way back to 0.91, is good enough. That means using item title, link and description where possible. Taking advantage of link being optional and instead using an element introduced much later in the form of guid is irritating at best and just smacks of being awkward to make a point. If this is making point to create discussion, well fair enough. But if this is what you think RSS feeds should look like then you're wrong, wrong, wrong. LEAVE RSS ALONE! |
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[ 03-Jul-03 1:22pm ]
