Andreas Haugstrup Pedersen | solitude.dk

Dave Winer posted an entry on how blogging tools should support enclosures. He is still missing the most important part.

I've seen other approaches discussed, for example, scraping the HTML of the blog post, looking for a link to something enclosure-like, and generating the enclosure element from that. This approach has problems, for example, how does the user control which element is enclosed? There can be more than one anchor element in the HTML text.

This is exactly what the rel-attribute was created to handle! It describes relationships between resources — such as, oh, I don't know, between the permalink and a Podcast mp3. You can't create an RSS feed containing enclosures without having the same information saved in the permalink. What happens when someone (like a computer program) goes to the permalink one month later? That's right, it can't find the enclosure if it's not described in the HTML. RSS is a syndication format. It syndicates information saved elsewhere, syndicating enclosures without having appropriate mark-up is just plain wrong.