Shared item
1 shares
RSS 2.0 guid is broken by default
via Nelson's Weblog by Nelson Minar on April 10, 2008
RSS 2.0 is a bad format. I just helped Andy debug a problem with his linkblog's feed. Google Readerwas sending folks to his own domain rather than directly to the linkdestination. Why? Because RSS 2.0 is stupid.
The problem is the guidelement in the feed was being used instead of the linkelement you'd expect. Why? Well, read the spec:
There are no rules for the syntax of a guid.Aggregators must view them as a string.
Follow all that? guid is defined to be any ol' string. Only later welearn that by default, it's assumed to be a URL that feed readers mayuse to override the other URL in the entry.In other words, the default behaviour of guid is broken and every RSS2.0 feed should probably be setting isPermaLink to false on every single entry.
If the guid element has an attribute named "isPermaLink" with a valueof 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.
isPermaLink is optional, its default value is trueMost people have probably never seen this bug because on a typicalfeed the link and guid both point to the same URL.
Shared by: