More advice for RSS developers

By Dave Winer on 1/23/07; 12:43:43 PM.

My last piece about RSS aggregators was well received, so let's try some more advice. 

From time to time I get emails from readers saying the feed for Scripting News doesn't display well in apps like Netvibes or Google's customizable home page because some of my items don't have titles. Some have even said I am wrong to have items without titles, but I don't agree, and the spec backs me up on that. The item-level title is optional.  

The reason titles are optional is that there have always been blogs that had items that don't have titles and those items had to be expressable in RSS, as did ones with titles. There are some aggregators (such as the ones I wrote) that deal perfectly well with either kind of item, so I know it can be done. Two of the earliest blogs, Scripting News and Robot Wisdom, both had title-less items. I admit they're not common, but it's good way to blog, and right now I'm not going to change, especially when the developers who are reading these feeds could easily adapt (and since they all came after RSS had this feature, it seems to me that they must). 

Anyway, that's the historic preamble. Now here are two ways to deal with titleless items.  

Choice #1: The simplest way is to ignore items with no titles. Pretend they don't exist. This is so much better than displaying a blank line, which is what some do. 

Choice #2: Synthesize a title. Here's a way to do that. Take the description text, strip the markup, take the first fifty characters (or whatever works for you) and add an ellipsis (two or three dots). If you really want to be cool, back up to the last space, delete everything after that, and then add the ellipsis.  

BTW, there are likely to be some condescending and fairly nasty comments about this, and that sometimes has the effect of reflecting negatively on me. That's how those people stop me from helping, or at least how they have in the past, and it's one of the reason blogging doesn't work so well these days. If you take the way they express their opinons as reflecting only on them, then we can go somewhere. You have a lot more power than you realize. Me, I'm just trying to make things work better. Really.