accidental_rss

Posted 2003-02-10 @ 22:17:51

Tantek Çelik:

Uh, folks, looks like I've got an RSS feed (except the entry titles appear to be missing their last characters). Doesn't this mean that anyone can provide RSS feeds for any/all blogs that use valid and semantically rich XHTML? I have to consider the implications of this a bit more.

Isn't this the whole point of using valid, semantically rich markup?

While third party providing an RSS feed for a given site is a bit suspect?just as referencing a URL via [i]frames embedded in a remote document might be, this is the first example I can recall which proves that using valid, semantically rich markup negates the need to provide a special format suited for syndication.

Obviously, the XSLT style sheet used for Tantek's blog wouldn't work for others, but much like an address book does when importing data from a tab-delimited text file, an intelligent aggregator could allow the user to map the appropriate elements from the source document's DOM tree to specific fields within the application's output.