Brent, Phil, and Ben are discussing whether RSS feeds should have relative or absolute URLs in encoded HTML.  This has bothered me in the past, particularly when viewing Joel On Software's RSS feed through the lens of the Radio Aggregator.  His feed has a number of instances of <a href="news/...> and <IMG src="pictures/...">.  Is it valid RSS?  Absolutely!  Does it provide the greatest value to the widest possible audience?  Well, perhaps it could be improved a little.  And perhaps the aggregators can do better too.

There probably are a number of things which are quite legal RSS, but are less than neighborly.  For example, a <script> tag.  Or a <meta> tag.  Or an <embed> tag.  Or an <object> tag.  You get the picture.  What I would like to do is to have the greater community discuss this for a few days, and then Mark and I will implement it in the RSS validator.  As always, validation and compliance will be completely voluntary.  We will clearly separate errors from warnings.  In fact, we will provide an option to not see the warnings at all, if that is your preference.

  6:56:07 PM   Comment