Apr
29
29
Conventional RSS
Filed under: Asides, RSS | April 29th, 2006
Alex from Textpattern has started putting thoughts down on what we’re calling “conventional RSS.” It’s not a spec, profile, or anything like that. It’s just a documentation of the things we do in our RSS 2.0 feeds. There are some minor differences with what WP currently does, but at least in the beginning WordPress and Textpattern will have a shared set of conventions and assumptions. (4)
kapeka | April 29th, 2006 @ 2:53 am | Reply
Is this the beginning of the Merge between Textpattern and Wordpress to WordPattern …
Brendan | April 30th, 2006 @ 3:56 am | Reply
The idea is cool - however surely if an appropriate spec exists, it should be used? There has recently been a little friction and resistance regarding some subtle changes to RSS 2.0 formatting, so ideally a move should be made to stick to the actual documented format as much as is possible - if everyone does that then txp, wordpress, etc will all share the same format.
Otherwise there is a risk that txp, wordpress, et-all end up with some weird 2.0a1 format that some readers may have issues with.
Just a thought.
Firas | April 30th, 2006 @ 4:26 pm | Reply
Brendan, the existing spec says, eg., ‘build a house with a door’. Asking the spec author what sort of door is required causes all hell to break loose. All the ‘Conventional RSS’ guidelines do is specify the height and width of the door used in a couple of largely-deployed blogging apps.
Alex Shiels | April 30th, 2006 @ 4:36 pm | Reply
Brendan: Conventional RSS is intended to stay entirely within the spec. A Conventional RSS feed should be 100% valid per the current RSS 2.0 specification.
The point is that RSS 2.0 is so vague and loosely specified that it’s possible (and common) for different applications to produce feeds that are all valid, but semantically very different. Conventional RSS is about trying to reduce those differences, and make life easier for RSS consumers.