Why I said Movable Type's RSS support is "funky." [Scripting News]

OK, let's see if I can capture this. I posted the same bit to an MT blog and a Radio blog and took a look at the XML output of both.  First, MT outputs both RSS 2.0 and RSS 1.0 (as RDF).  In neither does MT output the whole text of the post in the appropriate element, but rather truncates it after x characters.  MT adds and modifies elements of the spec.  Radio outputs RSS 2.0.  From the Radio feed, I could completely rebuild the blog post since it includes the entrie text of the post and all of the relevant links. RSS 2.0 does a great job of capturing the entirety of the post which makes it very useful for someone on the receiving end of feed to use the information in fun and creative ways.

So what does Dave mean by 'funky'?  Probably that MT is claiming to use RSS 2.0 and then doing things like modifying elements to incorporate chunks of the RSS 1.0/RDF spec.  Why bother doing this?  The RSS 2.0 spec stands on its own and deserves to be treated with respect and not modified at will.  The MT modifications don't add anything to the spec, just change it.  If I had a PHP parser that was processing feeds identifying themselves as RSS 2.0 and it came across MT's feed, it would break. 

Here's the XML kicked out of both.

11:02:32 AM    comment []  

From Dave @ Scripting news : A question for educators who do weblogs. I'm looking for people who support people who use weblogs, in a context that is not about weblogs, if possible. For example, a history class where each student keeps a weblog. Teachers who manage classes with a weblog. My goal of course is to learn from them, and then figure out what the next steps are. What do they need from other educators. What software is missing? We've already got some famous universities, I want to get connected with some not-so-famous universities. Who is leading in use of weblogs in education? Who do you look to for insight and inspiration? That's who I want for BloggerCon. [Scripting News]

Any takers in teknoids land? Anybody doing anything with blogs in law schools? How about something like a cyberlaw seminar that gives each student a blog?  CALI would host (for members).

10:39:58 AM    comment []