The Mess that is RSS

Today I made my first foray into the great RSS debate/argument by commenting on Dave’s post entitled Why I said Moveable Type’s RSS support is “funky”. He didn’t really provide a good explanation and a lot of people have commented asking what he really meant, but he has decided he doesn’t want to go into details. I ended up reading a bunch of posts and comment threads about the history of RSS and made my own hypothesis about why Dave called MT RSS “funky”.

Here is a repost of my comment

I do not consider myself an expert on RSS or the messy history behind it. However, after doing a bit of research into the RSS 2.0 spec, reading several links to the history of RSS and examining the output of MT RRS 2.0 and the output of Radio I think I might be able to help explain why Dave calls MT’s RSS funky.

MT output is technically valid RSS 2.0 as in it include all of the required fields. However it uses few if any of the optional fields and instead uses RDF namespaces that provide almost identical fields. Thus instead of using pubDate to indicate when an item is published, MT uses dc:date. MT does this for several other fields including language, lastBuildDate, and category. Therefore it seems MT is doing the least possible to conform to the RSS 2.0 spec.

For current MT users who want to “non-funky” RSS 2.0 you can change the template that generates the RSS 2.0 index fairly easily. Randy Charles Morin provides a template along with the required steps in a post above. Of course I imagine few users will do this because most don’t know their is a problem or don’t understand the problem.

As I said before I am not an expert. It would be nice to get this confirmed by Dave, but I don’t think that is going to happen. Anyway, I hope I’ve help someone understand a bit more.

Anyway, it appears my hypothesis was one of several reached by some others over at Sam Ruby’s weblog. I really had to go into more research than should be necessary in order to make a hypothesis that will probably never be answered. Along the way I did learn a lot more about the messy history behind RSS and confirmed for myself some less than pleasant revelations about Dave. In the end I am going to stick with the RSS 1.0 and maybe throw up a link to the default RSS 2.0 generated by MT. It may be considered “funky” but as Dave pointed out “funky” is not always bad