The clue-by-four hits
Give me long enough, and enough clues, and eventually I’ll catch on. I completely failed to grasp why Jim wouldn’t use RSS 1.0 because <title> is required. I didn’t really get why he supported TrackBack but didn’t fake a <dc:title> so that the Movable Type “Select a TrackBack entry to ping” select list was mostly a list of blanks, but I asked Ben to fake it up in the bookmarklet code anyway.
Then this morning on the way to work the other shoe dropped, and I finally realized what Jim meant by:
having producing tools [create fake titles] results in data loss unless you then add further metadata to say this title isn’t real, it was just something i made up to appease some people’s notions of what a weblog entry should look like.
If you’re slow like me, here’s the for-dummies explanation: suppose you don’t use titles on your weblog posts, but because a title is required in several versions of RSS and in the TrackBack RDF, you use the first few words of your post for the title. An RSS aggregator doesn’t know that it isn’t a real title, so it displays:
Give me long
Give me long enough, and enough clues,…
and someone who is doing a TrackBack threading tool that displays titles and excerpts from the RDF will display the same thing. Worse yet, since title is required, people like me are likely to fail to grasp that it’s the element that’s required, not the content, and so they’ll display either RSS or TrackBack pings using the title as the text of the link to the full post, not realizing that since <title /> is perfectly valid they may well end up with an invisible link. If, rather than creating the fake title on the producing end, you create it on the consuming end, then you can use it where you need it (in a link, or a select list), but you’ll know not to use it as a title for reading purposes.
What’s needed, however, is a recognized method to fall back on some other element in lieu of a title. Putting a timestamp on the item would probably work quite nicely in most situations that want to display something to an RSS consumer. The only trick being to encourage that sort of fall-back behavior on the part of developers writing tools to consume the RSS.
I’m not so sure there does need to be just one fallback. In a display of linked-title + description, linking the datetime would probably be a good choice most of the time (has the advantage of the permalink association for bloggers), but in a list of titles only, I’d much rather see the first few words: it’s easier for me to remember if I read ”Give me long enough” than to remember if I read ”9 Sep 2002 18:18:00 -0800”.
I’d say there’s more of a need for three-way education: producers need to know that it’s better to not fake data, makers of consuming tools need to remember that they may well get empty elements, and authors of specs and primers need to know that they should be telling that to both other parties.