Random Bytes...by Ross Rader :: RSS Development: Pleading the textInput case

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by Ross at 03:14PM (EST) on March 29, 2005 | Permanent Link

I think I've read the RSS 2.0 specification a thousand times. Which is a good thing. I can't count the number of times that I've found something "new" that I hadn't quite grokked in prior readings.

Today, this little gem jumped out at me.

"The purpose of the (textInput) element is something of a mystery. You can use it to specify a search engine box. Or to allow a reader to provide feedback. Most aggregators ignore it."

Its a shame that most aggregators are ignoring this element currently. I can think of a dozen nifty things that I'd like to try out with this. Rating systems, authentication (?), commenting, voting...

Of course, it wasn't too long ago that most aggregators were ignoring the enclosure element. Now look at them - everyone is rushing to support enclosures so that they can ride the Podcasting train.

Maybe the agg-dev guys will pick up on this nugget of coolness as well. Wait a second. I *am* an agg-dev guy. Okay RSS generator folks - enable me! I'd love to implement some of the interactivity that this makes possible.

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Comments

Re: RSS Development: Pleading the textInput case

by Roger Benningfield on Tue 29 Mar 2005 06:14 PM EST | Profile | Permanent Link

Ross: Just as a reminder, Blogger isn't an "RSS generator".

Re: Re: RSS Development: Pleading the textInput case

by Ross on Tue 29 Mar 2005 06:18 PM EST | Profile | Permanent Link

But they *could* be! :)

I'll take my enablers from anyone that wants to play.

Is there an Atom equivalent of textInput? I'd settle to see that even...

Re: RSS Development: Pleading the textInput case

by Roger Benningfield on Thu 31 Mar 2005 12:39 PM EST | Profile | Permanent Link

Nope, no textInput in Atom. Although if use of the element were to take off, there would be nothing stopping people from inserting rss:textInput into an Atom feed as a namespaced extension.

Re: RSS Development: Pleading the textInput case

by Phil Ringnalda on Sat 02 Apr 2005 02:10 AM EST | Profile | Permanent Link

I can think of a dozen things that couldn't actually be done with it, which could actually be done by just including them in the body of the item. Remember, as your link fragment says, it's a subElementOfChannel: you get one for your whole feed. Commenting on the whole feed, in a single single-line text input? Is My Feed Hot Or Not, based on whatever entry you happen to be looking at now?

It was sort of useful in its day, which was in 1999 in My.Netscape, when you were looking at three HTML tips and wanted to search for "frameset" to see if they had an article on them, because who knew if they were indexed by AltaVista or HotBot or whether the article was only a month old, so it wouldn't be in any search engine, or, when (as we actually did back then), you would give some company with an interesting article or two your email address because you wanted them to send you email. Now? Dunno. I used to have a "Search me" textInput in my feed, but I couldn't find a single consumer that was using it, so I took it out.