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yet another Microsoft blogger

# Saturday, January 08, 2005

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.

 

Saturday, January 08, 2005 8:07:59 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)
"Since all RSS aggregators must support the description tag, which contains all the escaped html content of the post"

That was the core of the argument for xhtml:body...

The RSS "spec" is unclear as to whether or not the description can contain escaped HTML. There was an argument (which I supported) to only use non HTML in the description (actually have a small, non-HTML description of the entry) and use xhtml:body for the rich text stuff.

The fact that dasBlog repeats the item body in the description if you don't give it one is, in my opinion, incorrect. That's why I always enter a description that contains a small excerpt from the entry (or even a description of what's inside).

I'd rather see us "fix" dasBlog to NOT put the body in the description tag and force the user to enter a description. If they do not, we should truncate the body and strip ALL HTML from it to show in the description tag.

And here comes the argument again... ;)
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