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One of RSS's Missing Feature

I think one of the things that RSS is missing is a GUID for each news item. I subscribe to most of the feeds on MSDN but not all of them. So, if something is posted that is Visual Studio-specific will probably get posted on the MSDN feed, the Visual Basic feed, the Visual C# feed, and the .NET Framework feed. So, I will have to mark each of these four items as read. Why not just give the news item a GUID and when that GUID is marked as read, it will be marked as read everywhere. Just my $0.02.
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Print posted @ Thursday, September 23, 2004 10:26 PM

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# re: One of RSS's Missing Feature

Gravatar Don't blame the spec, blame the implementation (either MSDN's feeds or your news aggregator). MSDN isn't using the optional GUID element. I would think that aggregators would treat the link element as a unique key, but that really depends on how it treats it.

The problem with using the Link element as a GUID is that sometimes it represents a link to the source article mentioned in the RSS item, not as a permalink to the RSS entry. This is one of the reasons that the GUID element was created. However, a lot of feeds go with the old RSS style (Link - Title - Description) items.

I ran into the same issue when MSDN first introduced its feeds and unsubscribed because of it. Bloglines (my aggregator of choice) still shows the same item in multiple feeds. In fact, Weblogs.asp.net uses the proper GUID element, yet Bloglines still shows duplicate items. I wonder how other aggregators fare on this issue? 9/24/2004 2:37 AM | rick

# re: One of RSS's Missing Feature

Gravatar I know that RSSBandit shows the same item multiple times. It also annoys me that when a seperate post is referred to as a comment in another post, it shows up as unread. The comments are usually more interesting than the post so I hardly ever miss them.
I thought it was a shortcoming of RSS but I guess it is a shortcoming of the publishers and aggregators. 9/24/2004 6:56 AM | Jason Bentley
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