[documentation] Re: NEED CHANGE IN RSS OUTPUT

Fri Dec 2 09:50:31 UTC 2005

OK, I'll pitch in with my two st.

good design == good accessibility == good SEO - true, very true
good design == don't break standards == good SEO - true as well

now I never though I will be following so eagerly a discussion about
what should go in a title.

Site title in RSS should go in <channel><title>, which I will agree with
everyone of you, might not be the most useful thing, but it is still the
one we have. Not the most useful, as in drupal's case, for example, we
should be able to state a site and channel separately, simply because
each feed is a different channel, so we might get more useful info from
a <site> tag, but we don't have that luxury. So we must do with what we
have.

Usability - RSS is designed for machines to interpret things for
humans. So we first must not break the machine usability, so the
aggregators can do their best job to filter and present the <items>
to the best of their ability to stupid humans like me. This means
that Liza's suggestion of putting the site title automatically into the
item is not a good thing. It adds a meta-data somewhere where it can't
be assessed and evaluated, thus rendering it uselless. There might be
some (minor) mileage for this in planet-rss style feeds.

Accessibility - read my usability scribble above and add that to have
good accessibility don't confuse the machines - they are the ones that
interepret things for the disabled people.

in HTML - well we aready do that for <head><title>. Don't we?

And in the best spirit of tantric warfare, meditate, before you engage
in raging battle. 

Cheers,
Vlado

Ducks and runs like a coward