[Guest]

The suggestion that should be in seconds and not minutes like the 2.0 standard by default will require a number of feed changes. For example, 60 currently means 60 minutes, not seconds.

Is this a mistake?

Patrick O'Lone

[jonathan_avidan]

You are correct; the RSS 2.0 spec says the default value is minutes. This will be corrected.

[PhilRingnalda]

Actually, being backwards compatible means more than just using the same defaults: you can't be misunderstood by a consumer that only knows RSS 2.0, which means you can't do many of the things you want.

Not only do you have to have the same default for ttl, you can't add an attribute that RSS 2.0 doesn't know about that changes the meaning of the content. Your span="days" would mean that an RSS 3.0 consumer would think three days when an RSS 2.0 consumer would think three minutes.

The same is true for your guid changes: without an isPermaLink="false" attribute, a guid with type="code" is an opaque string to an RSS 3.0 consumer, and a (broken) permalink to an RSS 2.0 consumer.

HTML in description is another genie that you can't stuff back into the bottle: if you say that it's text, then when I want to discuss an HTML example I will escape the greater-than character just once, without then double-escaping the ampersand as well. To an RSS 3.0 consumer that's an example of code, and to an RSS 2.0 consumer it *is* code.

Similarly, you can't redefine language or pubDate to refer to the linked resource with an attribute that existing clients don't know about, because they will incorrectly assume you mean the feed.

[Edward]

I would like to have "minutes", too. The example with 60
"seconds" let´s me suck from our server too often.

The Version 2.0 and 3.0 are separate versions, i decide
after grabbing the versions from rss to tell the independent
Element parser which class to assign a instance to hang into
the Tree.

And Phil, you are right. Reading a 3.0 rss in my 2.0
newsreader would not assign the span, too. I glady have
let the ttl stay unused, but shown, in the reader. About
aggregating to disk: i skipped the code here.

The decision, how often the rss will be refreshed, lies at
the author. He knows, how often he will let the others get
the latest rss. "minutes" should be the the default value.

If you know that experience shows no updates for over n
"hours" being the most distributed, let the higher value
be the default.