Saturday, June 14, 2003

Antibiotic Days 11:21:32 AM • • comment [] • Google It! Tim Bray: [...] there was a time when being a Web Guy was like being Gandalf the wizard and James Herriot the country vet all rolled into one.

Full Content RSS Fragments 10:25:46 AM • • comment [] • Google It! In the RSS world, opinions differ on the important issue of whether or not to provide full content RSS feeds (that is, whether at least one of item/description, item/dc:content, or item/xhtml:body has the full "information" content of the item). Ignoring for the moment conceptual aspects (for example, is the RSS feed a notification channel to draw people to the web site or a "first-class" content distribution means), there are significant "down-to-earth" aspects to this issue: both producers and consumers would like to cut down their bandwidth costs. Downloading a 15-items full content feed when only one or two items change per download is wasteful. This has driven many producers to offer only "lightweight" feeds, in which the content is some "lossy-compression" of the full content, which is not provided as RSS. Sometimes the "compression" is done by providing just the first N words (or sentences) of the content; in other feeds the author providing an abstract in the RSS feed, or use a "tease" catch-phrase. In all cases, consumers have to manually go back to the original publisher's site to get the full monty. Problem is, this makes reading RSS feeds unpleasant for a large group of people who read RSS feeds offline. Imagine this: you're on the train, happilly reading all the RSS feeds you've collected in your aggregator, when you read something interesting on Sam Ruby's weblog. Sam, however, just switched to short-form feeds, so you're out of luck; you have to wait until you get home to get it all. It doesn't have to be this way. Here's the idea: In every RSS <item>, provide a link to a resource that holds the item's full content in RSS form. For example: http://bla.bla.bla.com/blog/12345.rss (Hopefully, Joe would allow me to use his well-formed web namespace.) The resource indicated by link-to-rss is a valid RSS feed, probably (but not mandatorily) including only a single <item>, with full content. Aggregators are already quite good at detecting when items in an RSS feed change (by hashing title/link/description like Aggie does, or by looking into the dc:date/pubDate, or via similar means), so all an aggregator has to do is detect that an RSS item has been added/modified, and then download the item itself, this time with full content included. Comments?

© Copyright 2003 Ziv Caspi.