Subject: PaceRecommendPlainTextContent

From: Antone Roundy <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 5 May 2005 09:04:47 -0600

-1.

This is entirely up to the publisher.  I think enough publishers are 
going to want things like <a href="...">links</a> and line/paragraph 
breaks in their content that this recommendation would be so routinely 
ignored as to be meaningless.

---

From: Eric Scheid <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 06 May 2005 01:37:06 +1000

-1 also.

> Abstract
>
> Text containers and content blocks specifically may contain rich-text, which
> must be down-stripped by more basic aggregators. Simply removing tags from
> X/HTML streams can however easily truncate meaning as well.

I am subscribed to multiple feeds which already down-strip their X/HTML
content for their feeds, and definitely agree that such down-stripping does
clobber a lot of meaning.

This pace, if the recommendation takes effect, would result in yet more
publishers down-stripping their rich content at the publishing end. Let a
thousand buggy implementations bloom :-(

I say leave the down-stripping in the aggregator - that way if it really is
awful the user can choose a different aggregator.

> The examples are of course construed. Most blogging software doesn't emit such
> exotic HTML features.

A far more common example (ie. less exotic html) is where <blockquote> or
<cite> get stripped. Reading the stripped-text version of that can be quite
confusing.

e.