Whenever I click to view the description of a Pocket PC Thoughts RSS item, I get something like the following:
Updated HP Mobile Printing Software
<![CDATA[
I was fairly impressed with how well HP's free
I see that it's in the XML input also - is this a fault in their syndicated feed?
yeah, I think the ppc thoughts feed uses html in the descriptions, and TodayPlus treates it as plain text.
I'm not sure if this is common practice, or something just PPC Thoughts do. Is it worth coding around? ie stripping HTML tags when displaying descriptions?
Also, I have noticed some occurrences of " in some description text. Would such common codes be translatable? (I know this stuff is way down the TODO list)
I had similar problems with other rss feeds (german)
Please fix it ;)
theres not much I can do except maybe render the text in a HTML control, and I'm not sure of the ramifications of this, or even how feasable it is.
Well, on a whim I've contacted Pocket PC Thoughts to see if they can provide an RSS feed without HTML.
also, they should really not provide the entire news item in the description, but just a couple of lines...
Quote from: srsalso, they should really not provide the entire news item in the description, but just a couple of lines...
Yep, for instance like all BBC news feeds, those are simple, objective and cleanly formatted :)
Initial response from Pocket PC Thoughts:
Quote from: Pocket PC ThoughtsNo, I'm afraid we don't have a plain-text RSS feed. Is that common for RSS clients, not being able to cope with HTML? We use HTML to give us a little control over the formatting...
I'd like to continue the dialogue, with the ultimate aim being to get a BBC-like RSS feed, but I wasn't honestly able to answer his direct question, ie is it common for RSS clients not to be able to cope with HTML?
Personally I don't understand the need for HTML in the description, and intend to tell him so, but it would be great if I could add some weight to my argument with an implicit userbase that is currently suffering with their feed.
well I really haven't used any other rss software so I cant comment on that. Actually TodayPlus doesn't really parse RSS as RSS, just as a text file, extracting whats needed. So no XML validation dom and all that stuff...
The way the PPCT rss feed is set up right now seems to be just basically an exact copy of the text that's posted on the site itself, so I'm assuming the RSS feed is autogenerated and they only type their news stories once. While this is probably easiest for them, I don't think it makes sense, both from a user perspective, and from their perspective.
From a user's perspective, I believe the RSS description should a short and simple text description of the item. If the user is interested in that item they can check out the actual item at the main website.
From their perspective, the rss feed gives no incentive for people to actually visit their site, since the description contains all the text of whats posted on the site. They lose page hits / ad views etc. Whats more their RSS feed is much larger (in kBs) than most other feeds, most of the time > 10 kB (after which TodayPlus stops downloading). This ups their bandwidth costs, and is disadvantagous to people who are using RSS in low bandwidth situations (GSM / GPRS connections).
Also, I'm not exactly positive, but I think theres a bug in their RSS feed when you use the pocket pc IE as the user id string (in pocket internet explorer, I get an error when visiting pocketpcthoughts.com/xml , but works fine in ie) I coded around this problem in TodayPlus, where the initial request for the RSS feed is made with a different user string, and the downloading of the cache is done with the win ce user string.
I let this one slide a little, and only wrote back to them today and already I've had a reply from Jason at Pocket PC Thoughts on the possibility of re-working their feed:
Quote from: Jason from PocketPC ThoughtsThanks Alastair, I'll think about it. :-) One of the problems we have is that we don't have any description meta-data. We have the subject, and the full story - nothing in-between.
Not totally positive, but they might find a way to get the required metadata.
I have to admit I didn't broach the subject of the bug in the feed - will write him another mail.
There are several "versions" of RSS and the latest support CDATA which can contain embedded HTML. My own site uses it, in fact, as do many feeds that I subscribe to.
All Jason needs to do is make a slight modification to the template which generates PPCT's RSS feed to include a text-only description section, leaving the CDATA-enabled body section alone.
As for RSS being headlines only - try it sometime. Some users prefer that, but I'm definately not one of them. If I wanted to go to the website, I would go to the website and not bother with the RSS. Especially when it comes to a mobile device -- the only feeds I subscribe to with PocketFeed are ones that actually have something for me to read when I'm travelling; I could give a crap about mere headlines and no content. But then, many sites offer a selection of feeds so users can make their own choice of what they'd rather subscribe to.