Mark Pilgrim wrote (among other things):
> (And before you say "but my aggregator is nothing but a podcast
> client, and the feeds are nothing but links to enclosures, so
> it's obvious that the publisher wanted me to download them" -- WRONG!
I agree with just about everything that Mark wrote in his post.
However, I'm finding it very difficult to accept this bit about enclosures
(podcasts.) It seems to me that the very name "enclosure" implies that the
resources pointed to are to be considered part and parcel of the original
entry. In fact, I think one might even argue that if you *didn't* download
the enclosed items that you had created a "derivative work" that didn't
represent the item that was intended to be syndicated...
Others have pointed out the problem with links to images,
stylesheets, CSS files, etc. And, what about the numerous proposals for
"linking" one feed to another? What about the remote content pointed to by a
src attribute in an atom:content element? Should PubSub be able to read that
remote content when indexing and/or matching the entry?
It strikes me that not all URIs are created equally and not
everything that looks like crawling is really "crawling." I am firm in
believing that URI's in <a/> tags are the stuff of crawlers but the URIs in
<link/> tags, enclosures, media-rss objects, <img/> tags, etc. seem to be
qualitatively different. I think "crawling" URI's found in <link/> tags,
<img/> tags and enclosures isn't crawling... Or... Is there something I'm
missing here?
bob wyman
