Writing Online

But I thought that's what HREFs were for!

I'm really bothered by this exchange over link and guid in the rss2 specification. (I made a comment, but apparently I wasn't scatological enough.)

Within the channel element, link is "The URL to the HTML website corresponding to the channel."

Within the item element, link is The URL of the item.

Within the item element, guid is A string that uniquely identifies the item.

What is an item?

An item may represent a "story" — much like a story in a newspaper or magazine; if so its description is a synopsis of the story, and the link points to the full story. An item may also be complete in itself, if so, the description contains the text (entity-encoded HTML is allowed), and the link and title may be omitted. All elements of an item are optional, however at least one of title or description must be present.

[INSERT MORE HERE ap example, nyt example, me]

But then we have this clarification: link should be used only to link to the article being described by the post. Here's an example. In the example you'll find an item with 1) a title, 2) a link, 3) a description of the link, and 4) a guid, which is not a "permalink." Why? Because

If the guid element has an attribute named "isPermaLink" with a value of true, the reader may assume that it is a permalink to the item, that is, a url that can be opened in a Web browser, that points to the full item described by the element.

So, since thing described by my item element is not this, there is no permalink? That's a bit confusing.

And what it boils down to is that some vociferous people find it obscenely difficult to communicate effectively.

2:29:22 PM # Google It!
categories: Writing Online