RSS xhtml:body

A while ago there was some hubub about support for xhtml:body in the RSS item tag. Since all RSS aggregators must support the description tag, which contains all the escaped html content of the post, having another tag in the RSS feed that duplicates all this content into a tag that only some RSS readers understand seems silly. My RSS feed is 162k today, and if I stop including the body tag it goes down to 82k. Given that I'm doing about 400 MB in bandwidth transfer at my hosting provider and a large chunk of that is RSS, I'm thinking if folks want the body tag from dasBlog they can use the Atom feed.

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 08, 2005
  I think the issue is about trying to make the body a "cleaner" feed instead of escaped html. It is unfortunate that as the RSS/atom specs move & transition, older RSS aggregators are left in the dust. The alternative is keep around a less-ideal (debatable I'm sure) spec for purposes of legacy aggregators. I could be a bit too cowboyish, but I've always favored break-and-move than keep stuff lingering around. Oddly enough, my basement suffers from the opposite affliction, since it's cluttered with stuff I should have thrown away years ago. But I digress.
  
  Ben Strackany
  www.developmentnow.com