Favorited dev Notes for Markdown in RSS by Dave Winer

As part of celebrating twenty years of RSS, Dave Winer adds the ability to incorporate markdown in RSS feeds. Essentially this was always possible, but there was no way to tell a RSS reader that something was to be interpreted not as HTML but as Markdown. Doing this makes it possible to provide both HTML and Markdown in the same feed, if Markdown is e.g. the way you’ve written a posting and want to be able to also edit it again in Markdown, and not in HTML.

After my hiatus I think this is worth an experiment to see if I can generate an RSS feed directly from my markdown notes on my local system. Just like I already can generate OPML feeds and blogposts or website pages from my notes. Chris Aldrich recently asked about using WordPress and Webmention as a way of publishing your own notes with the capability of linking them to other peoples notes. Could RSS play a role there too? Could I provide selected RSS feeds for specific topics directly from my notes? Or for specific people? For them to read along? Is there something here that can play a role in social sharing of annotations, such as Hypothes.is provides? I need to play with this thought. RSS is well understood an broadly used, providing not just HTML but also Markdown through it sounds like a step worth exploring.

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8 reactions on “RSS Support For MarkDown

  1. @jasper if rss is one way perhaps or when you see it as a derivative of something already published, not I think when it’s two way or as a way to push stuff to a publishing platform, as Dave Winer discussed earlier this month. In the latter form the original source is useful to have, when you then want to edit again. Anyway, will need to mull this over. Was podcasting complicating the standard?

  2. @jasper yes it adds the url, but allows so by extending the spec with an enclosure element. The markdown in comparison is added through a source element alongside the html.

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