Monday, April 7, 2014; 3:47:30 PM Eastern
How to display title-less feed items
- I've written previously about why title-less feed items exist. In a nutshell, some posts are so short they don't have titles. Prime example: Tweets.
- Sometime soon the Scripting News feed will have title-less items. If you develop feed reading software and want to offer Scripting News links and posts to your readers, your software must be prepared to handle title-less items.
- This piece shows how a feed reader can intelligently handle items with and without titles.
- #### Terminology
- For this howto we may need up to four ingredients from a feed item: title, link, description, guid. When displaying the item, we need up to two bits: headline and body. Depending on what's in the item, the headline might link to something, or just be bare text linking to nothing.
- #### How to
- If the item has a title, the headline is the title.
- If the item has no title, but has a description, the headline is the first N characters of the description. The value of N is up to you, based on how you lay the items out on a page, or if it's a river. In this case the body is empty. We've already used the description once. This is where a few aggregators repeat the text. There's no need to do this, it's unsightly, confusing, and shows lack of care for the reader.
- The headline usually links to something. If the item has a link element, the headline links to that. If it has a guid, but no link and the guid is a permalink, the headline links to the guid. If it has no link, no guid, or the guid is not a permalink, then the headline is bare text, it's not an anchor element.
- If the item has no title and no description, it's not valid RSS -- skip it.
- #### Examples
- 1. An item with a title, link and description.
- 2. An item from a linkblog feed, has no title. The same item in my feed.
- 3. How Chrome displays my linkblog feed. :-(
- 4. A river that's made up of feeds with a mixture of titled and title-less items.
- #### RFC
- This is the method I've used in all my river software going back to 1999. They have all been able to handle title-less items. However, I wrote this howto from memory, not from code, so there might be omissions, mistakes or typos. Corrections are appreciated.
- Disclaimer: This isn't a standards body convening in the comments here. I just wrote a howto to help people out, not to begin a "process" or to debate. The Scripting News comment guidelines apply. Use your own space for essays, posts, opinions, screeds, memes, rants, etc that don't fit the guidelines. Thanks! :-)