Kent Newsome on technology, music and life

7/09/2007


Educating Kent: The Single RSS Enclosure Thing

Paging all RSS gurus.

I have a question.  In these media driven days, why do RSS feeds only have a single enclosure?  I'm sure there are plenty of good and/or bad reasons for this, and I suspect the topic has been beat to death by those more learned in RSS than me.  But I couldn't find a satisfactory answer when I googled it the other day.  It just seems odd that I can do a music post that looks like this on my blog, but only has a single enclosure in the feed.

It's sort of a disincentive for further music related posts.

What is the reason for this?  Will it ever change?

Can any of my RSS gurus (or anyone else knowledgeable) explain this to me?

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Posted by Kent @ 7/09/2007 10:49:00 PM | Permalink

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6 Comment(s):

I'm not sure it is really an rss thing. If you look at the html on the original post, it is just an "a" tag linking directly to an mp3 file.

Then there is some magic javascript from del.icio.us that adds the autoplay ability. I don't think Javascript code carries over to the rss feed code.

By Anonymous Mike, at 7/10/2007 7:09 AM  
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Maybe it's not RSS, but something in a feed takes the first audio file it finds and adds a play button at the bottom of the feed to play it. It's always the first audio file in the post.

What I'm wondering about is why that can't be done with all the audio files.

There was discussion in the Feedburner forums that indicated it was a RSS standards thing.

By Blogger Kent, at 7/10/2007 8:50 AM  
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Basically it's how the spec was written. enclosures were said to be optional.

By Blogger Randy Charles Morin, at 7/10/2007 10:42 AM  
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The long answer is in the profile, but the short version is that the intent in RSS 2.0 was for a one-to-one relationship between RSS items and enclosures, so the item title and description could be assumed to describe the enclosure.

By Blogger Rogers, at 7/10/2007 11:01 AM  
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An RSS "feed" can have multiple enclosures. An RSS feed is made up of "items", it makes sense for an "item" to have a single enclosure. Multiple enclosures would be multiple items.

The issue might be that people are thinking about enclosures as attachments like in an email. However, when thinking about enclosures with something like a podcast feed, each audio file is a separate item, and thus a separate item in the feed.

By Anonymous Jackson Miller, at 7/10/2007 8:48 PM  
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Yeah, I'm a little confused by the profile.

I get why a podcast ought to have a single enclosure, so it can be correctly named and categorized, etc.

But it seems to me that multiple audio files in a single post ought to somehow be treated equally- the effect of what I mean by that is that they would all be playable like the first one from within a feed. Granted, there may be no way to distinguish a podcast from an audio file within a post.

But in this day where everything is about pushing media, it seems inevitable to me, as a publisher and end user, that multiple audio files will need to be addressed.

By Blogger Kent, at 7/11/2007 12:44 AM  
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