Underutilised Feed Data

A feed file - be it in RSS, Atom, or JSON format - can contain quite a bit of useful information. And I think this is underutilised by a lot of existing feed readers.

This is true for both feed level attributes as well as feed entry level attributes.

On the feed level, even simple and straight forward information like a description /subtitle or details about the author(s) are often ignored. And sure, there are more obscure attributes like rights/copyright or generator, which might not be as relevant. Nevertheless, all this information together adds up, and can really give a more comprehensive picture about a feed - if this data has been added by the publisher.

That’s why FeedCity has (public) “profile” pages for all feeds, displaying all this information.

And when you’re logged in, you also get a “Reply via Email” link under every entry, if its author has added this info to the feed (or an individual feed entry/item). This enables a simple, easy, and open comment system (others seem to agree).

And on the feed entry level, there’s an enclosure attribute for example, which often seems to get ignored: be it for “audio”-, “video”-, or even “image”-content. This seems to be forcing feed creators to stick everything into an item’s generic content attribute. Which is not wrong per se - and sometimes preferable even. But I think, if it’s in the spec, basic things like this should be shown by a feed reader.

And there are even more attributes that I didn’t mention, which could (and should) be utilised. FeedCity does not show all available information, yet, either. But I’m determined to change this bit by bit and render increasingly information-rich feeds and feed items/entries.

/Daniel