Be happy!
Matthew Ernst: content:encoded makes me sad:
People that include the full text in their RSS 2.0 feed instead of just an automatically truncated “excerptoid” make me happy. However, including the full text in a <content:encoded> while still keeping the exceptoid in the <description> makes me sad. I’m not even sure what the motivation is to having <content:encoded>, since as far as I know you can put that sort of thing in an RSS 2.0 <description> just fine.
You certainly can put anything you want in an RSS 2.0 <description>. That doesn’t mean you should. I think it’s a great thing that so many people are reading blogs in RSS aggregators these days, and as a result agitating to have more people do full-content feeds.
However, we need to not lose sight of the fact that reading in an aggregator isn’t the only use for RSS. My blog is syndicated (in the original sense of Really Simple Syndication, publishing on another website) in a couple of places that don’t really make use of a hand-crafted excerpt, but if you look at Henrik Gemal’s Mozilla-related blogs page, and hover over the links, you’ll see that some people have short ugly chopped off posts from Movable Type’s auto-excerpts, and some people have slightly longer ugly chopped off posts from Gemal’s own auto-excerpting, but a few people have a perfectly sensible, readable and understandable excerpt, because they put one in for things that syndicate, along with <content:encoded> for people who are using RSS for reading.
It’s a marvelous combination, having two elements for each of two different uses (three, if you count people who have intentionally built their aggregator to only show them a short description because they would rather read posts in the original web page), and I only hope that Radio includes Matthew’s code or something like it (just like it did with his code that now allows him to talk about those tags with HTML entities without double-decoding them and interpreting them) so that Radio users can enjoy full content in their aggregator without forcing people who are also providing their feed to syndicators to not provide them what they want.
Virtually all of RSS 2.0’s technical shortcomings are actually technical shortcomings of Radio (and Manila). No room to put both summary and full content in your blog, no interface to choose between them in your aggregator, thus the underlying format doesn’t need two fields. So we get 3 different undocumented or semi-documented ways to do it, and every now and then people yell at you for trying to innovate. Damn it, people, if Radio doesn’t need it, it should be obvious that nobody needs it! Stop innovating! Leave RSS alone!
Oh, and switch to Atom, which has separate summary and content elements for exactly this purpose.
The decision not to offer both full text and summary fields in Radio is not a ”technical shortcoming” — it’s a design choice. UserLand wanted software that could be used by a novice to create a first weblog post in five minutes.
When you consider that, the decision not to use a form as complicated as Movable Type’s entry/extended entry/excerpt form makes sense. If anything, RSS 2.0 influenced Radio, not the other way around.
I wish you could tout Atom without making these kinds of false claims about Radio or UserLand. You’re not a Radio user. You’re not a UserTalk programmer. And it shows every time you talk about them.