Having to recode for syndication?
February 4th, 2005 by 
Phil
I’ve just realised a flaw in my feeds.
When I provide a blockquote, I always fill in the cite attribute, and then use JavaScript to pull it out and display a link to the source after the quote itself, but of course this doesn’t work in aggregators, and they’ll never see the link to my source, let alone know where it’s from! They’d need to either look at the source of the feed, or visit my actual webpage to find out, but there’s nothing in the content of my post which hints that they might not be getting all the information.
What can I do about this calamity? My first thought is stylesheets, but nothing doing – the aggregator does what it likes!
Does this mean I’ll have to start including an explicit link to my source when I quote someone? Surely there’s something else I can do?
Also check out Invisible Information: Machines get all the fun by Paul Haine.
Perhaps you should request aggregators to support it. However, this is essentially the same problem as web browsers face. They have to provide some interface for the attribute. However, they don’t, and therefore we create hacks to work around that problem.
Posted by Anne on February 5th, 2005 at 9:35 amCould you not use XSLT (or write a little program) to add “URI: http://…” to the bottom of a blockquote? I’ve only just started playing with XSLT but I’m sure it’s possible.
Posted by Tom Adams on February 5th, 2005 at 1:10 pmWell, browsers don’t have to provide an interface for it (there’s nothing in the spec about how to display it IIRC), which is probably why they don’t – in fact, does any browser do anything with the cite source of blockquote or q elements? Even showing it in a tooltip? Probably not
The problem is that our hacks around it, whether they’re CSS or JS, work at the presentation layer, which we have no control over in aggregators (which is why XSLT wouldn’t work – aggregators apply their own to the raw source of the feed).
Getting aggregator authors to support it is a possibility; I mean, they have to provide a transformation, so why not provide as much info as they can? But every day another aggregator appears, so it sounds like a losing battle and I can’t see a realistic alternative to just including the source of the quote in the text.
I really hate being defeatist
Posted by Pip on February 6th, 2005 at 2:26 amWell, the only other option, really, is to filter your content when you’re building your feeds to be more aggregator friendly. The only way to have the best of both worlds is to serve different things to aggregators and browsers
Posted by leff on February 7th, 2005 at 4:16 pmExcept for the lameasses like me who use hosted services
I could always redirect my current feed to atually point at an XSLT’d version of my feed with the relevant data extracted to be visible, which I guess is kind of the JS equivalent, but that’s one too many hoops for me I think
Posted by Pip on February 7th, 2005 at 5:06 pm