[documentation] Re: NEED CHANGE IN RSS OUTPUT

[andrew morton]

[I reordered Laura's comments to make my response clearer]

>  (As for RSS, I agree that web standards must be retained. AFAIK, most
> search engines crawl sites, use the title metatag to log posts, and don't
> use RSS for their content.)

Exactly. As far as I know search engines are index pages not RSS
feeds. I'd love to see some evidence to the contrary.

>  As for "evidence" that having the source before the title, I refer to the
> vast majority of CMSs that do just that. Google up just about anything and
> you'll see [source] : [title].... in nearly all the hits (unless there's a
> preponderance of Drupal-powered results).

Check out some random, popular, *RSS feeds* (not *pages* index by
Google) on Bloglines: http://bloglines.com/topblogs . How many do you
see with the site name prefixing the entry's title? I looked through
several and didn't see any.

I think some people are confusing RSS item titles and page titles.
Each has a very different purpose. The page title needs to represents
the site and the page. On an RSS feed, as others have noted, the
channel title represents the site (or part of the site if you've got
multiple feeds) while the item title represents the
article/podcast/whatever. The RSS reader presents the user with both
so they know what feed a given item is from.

So if it's not common and not used by Google, why should we make this change?

andrew