I’m starting to get a better grip on Rob’s problems with Radio generated RSS, but it is definitely not due to funkyness in the feed. I looked at my own Radio feed in NetNewsWire, and checked out the URLs linked in the headline. They point to the story that I linked to on his site. OK, for me that is expected behavior.
His point is valid, however. While I don’t care about it for this site, webloggers may want their RSS feeds to drive traffic to the blogs. The only way for them to do this would be to put the permalink URL in the link element, as MNJ and apparently a lot of other sites Rob reads do. Should the weblogger be able to determing whether link or guid is used as the headline link in aggregators? Should both be linked somehow? I don’t know, would prefer to hear from Dave, Brent and other aggregator developers. I would find it hard to believe that this issue hasn’t been discussed.
I also checked out Mark Pilgrim’s RSS feed in NNW; his lacks link elements, and has only guid. NNW uses the guid in the headline link, so NNW’s behavior seems to be use the link, in its absence, use the guid element. Not sure if it’s more complicated than that, but that’s my observation.
