Be happy!.
Matthew Ernst: content:encoded makes me sad:
People that include the full text in their RSS 2.0 feed
instead of just an automatically truncated "excerptoid" make me happy.
However, including the full text in a while still keeping the exceptoid in the makes me sad. I'm not even sure what the motivation is to having , since as far as I know you can put that sort of thing in an RSS 2.0 just fine.
You certainly can put anything you want in an RSS 2.0 .
That doesn't mean you should. I think it's a great thing that so many
people are reading blogs in RSS aggregators these days, and as a result
agitating to have more people do full-content feeds.
However, we need to not lose sight of the fact that reading in an
aggregator isn't the only use for RSS. My blog is syndicated (in the
original sense of Really Simple Syndication, publishing on another
website) in a couple of places that don't really make use of a
hand-crafted excerpt, but if you look at Henrik Gemal's Mozilla-related blogs
page, and hover over the links, you'll see that some people have short
ugly chopped off posts from Movable Type's auto-excerpts, and some
people have slightly longer ugly chopped off posts from Gemal's own
auto-excerpting, but a few people have a perfectly sensible, readable
and understandable excerpt, because they put one in for things that
syndicate, along with for people who are using RSS for reading.
It's a marvelous combination, having two elements for each of two
different uses (three, if you count people who have intentionally built
their aggregator to only show them a short description because they
would rather read posts in the original web page), and I only hope that
Radio includes Matthew's code or something like it (just like it did
with his code that now allows him to talk about those tags with HTML
entities without double-decoding them and interpreting them) so that
Radio users can enjoy full content in their aggregator without forcing
people who are also providing their feed to syndicators to not provide
them what they want.
[phil ringnalda dot com]
