This is a message to people who read Scripting News in a feed reader that doesn't fully support the RSS 2.0 format. #

RSS 2.0 allows for items without titles. And that's a good thing, because there are a lot of items out there that should be in feeds that aren't because feed readers don't handle them well.#

It's a throwback to the days when Google Reader dominated. They didn't pay attention to the spec, I guess, and as a result the RSS world couldn't grow to accommodate Twitter. In Twitter's defense, they tried to adapt, but it was too ugly. You'd see the tweet twice. Because Google Reader insisted that all items had to have titles. And tweets most definitely do not have titles. Eventually Twitter gave up and turned off the feeds. #

That's so unfortunate because it's actually very easy for a reader to support these items. #

You can do something good for RSS and help us make the feed world richer, if you ask the developer of your favorite reader to carefully adapt their product to handle items that don't have titles.#

Thanks!#

Dave Winer#