I strongly object to RSS in the way people are trying to use it.

Specifically I am responding to something Glynn Foster wrote at [www.gnome.org] but where I do not so much object – instead I am not sure he has thought through the ramifications of what he is saying.

Glynn writes:

Even though we now have wonderful sites like PlanetGNOME, PlanetDebian and PlanetSun [and an internal blogging site], we still have people being all rude and not publishing their entire blog entry in their RSS feed. It’s hugely infuriating having to click through to various blogs just to read them. Hopefully people are reading this and making suitable changes. Ahem.

But I have to ask What is RSS meant to do? – people’s expectations seem to be a bit schizophrenic at the moment.

I believe that RSS is meant to alert people of the existance / creation of a new posting, and perhaps provide some or all of the content for that posting; in such circumstance, the provision of truncated postings is perfectly fair and fit for purpose.

Glynn seems to be arguing that it is a blog-posting replication protocol, stripping the posting out of the context of its homepage and presenting its content in your favourite user interface – NetNewsWire or whatever.

Although this provides ease of use – and ironically although my RSS setup reinforces this exact mode of behaviour – I object to this latter as being (1) wasteful (2) complex and (3) providing an unnecessary layer of abstraction.

Propositions in favour of my argument?

1) Take a look at the RSS Mirror for Dropsafe that exists at [www.livejournal.com] ; the postings there have an entirely separate commenting mechanisms – indeed, an entire life of their own – and I have to poll that website occasionally in order to check if anyone has posted a comment in that forum, rather than on the “home” site. No doubt this also happens elsewhere.

2) In order to fix this, I have just hacked Blosxom’s internal RSS generator to append a “RSS Comment Link” to the syndication of every posting, directing them back to the original site. Perhaps this is functionality that is addressed in RSS v2.1.42beta7 or something, but having the experiential belief that nobody adheres to standards anyway – I have little belief that any convergence on a fixed RSS standard would happen any time soon.

2b) This further means that I am appending a bit of HTML to my postings, which is then superencoded into XML for RSS delivery, in order to sidestep an inadequacy in – or an improper usage of – RSS. Bizzare, no?

3) Syndication of entire articles means that you don’t get to see what your real hit-count is.

Glynn’s blog seems to lack a comment mechanism. Perhaps he’ll read this on [planetsun.org] and respond using the link below. 😎