Andreas Haugstrup Pedersen | solitude.dk

I've written before on why guessing when including files as enclosures is bad, but I would like elaborate a bit. To paraphrase my previous entry guessing is bad because the wrong files will be tagged as enclosures which results in muddy data (and likely confusion). In addition having only the enclosures marked in the RSS feed ensures that it's only possible to extract the enclosures while the blog entries are present in the feed — thus you will loose this very important information after the entry is pushed off the end of the feed.

What annoys me the most is that the current practice of guessing limits me in what I can and cannot link to. I can't link directly to media files because Me-Tv and services like it will display the media file as the primary content, even if I only linked to the file in a side comment. For example I can't write:

Peter, Kenyatta, Josh, Jay and Mica were <a href="http://poorbuthappy.com/ease/video/metv.mov">hanging out</a>. It looked like they had a lot of fun talking about Me-Tv.

Likewise Feedster will add the media file as an enclosure and assume that I am the owner of said media file. Following that line of thought the guessing actually limits how audio/video and weblogs can interact instead of opening up new possibilities — audio/video is marked as something seperate from the weblog, not as a part of it.

That was my primary goal with writing the HTML Meta Profile For Blogs. It gives authors a way of tagging files that should be considered enclosures. The advatanges are multiple.

1. The information about which files are enclosures are saved permanently with the blog entry, not only temporarily in the feed.
2. There is no muddy data since only the files the author has marked as enclosures will be treated as such.
3. As a result you can link to any kind of file without having to worry about it being presented as the main content of your blog post.

Of course changes would still be needed in the user interface of blogging systems to make it easy for non-HTML savvy authors to mark files as enclosures.