RSS might be one of those things you’ve been hearing about floating around the internet nowadays. It’s a truncated listing of all the recent entries in a blog or news site, meant to be read by an external RSS reader of some sort every few minutes, and provides a summary of the recent post as well as links to the full content and anything else relevant. With so much content out there, an RSS reader can take in hundreds of feeds and save its user the tediousness of visiting each one in turn.
And as with all things Internet, there’s no standard and most people do a poor job.
Let’s start with what RSS is supposed to do: to aggregate feeds and present quick-and-dirty blurbs about a new blog entry or news article. It’s there so the user doesn’t have to refresh and check the site manually, so the content must carefully balance holding the user’s interest and providing too much content.
Of course, most sites are too lazy. Most only give the title of their entry in their feed, which is good when the title is truly descriptive (like with most news headlines), but sometimes doesn’t say much of anything by itself (from bargain-hunting site techbargins.com, the title “_____ weekend sale” is common with absolutely no description of what’s actually on sale). Strangely, the site has these short descriptions, perfect as an RSS item, and the lack of information in the feed means that it’s usually easier to just visit the site instead and scroll through the entries.
At the other end of the spectrum are RSS feeds that dump the entire article into the feed. Not only does this take up more bandwidth (the reader has to read the entire file whenever a new entry shows up), but it means that the user no longer has any reason to visit your actual site. Engadget is a pretty popular tech/geek site, and for some reason they’ve decided to include entire posts in their feed, which means that if you subscribe, you no longer to have to go to their very ad-supported page. It’s usually not a good idea to invite users to bypass your primary revenue stream.
As with most things in computing, this happens when we’ve got too many smart people imposing their standards on a concept and creating software to support it: no actual standard, confusing and often contradictory behavior, and stuff that just doesn’t make sense once you pull back and take in the whole picture.