Fullfeeds.com wants you to sign a petition asking that feed providers include full articles and not just summaries in their RSS/Atom/etc. feeds.
At first glance it seems a worthy cause but after a bit of thinking I am actually not going to sign it even though I use RSS everyday and am working on an RSS project. Why? Take the BBC feeds for instance. Just summaries, no full articles. Wouldn’t it be awesome if the BBC feeds had full articles? Actually, no it wouldn’t. I use the BBC feeds just as they intend, as a way to quickly browse the news and then link through for more in depth reading of that news item. The summary serves a very specific purpose; it is a quick sound-bite of the whole article. It isn’t the same as taking a full article and displaying just the first paragraph. At least that is how it should be (the BBC feeds do just take the first paragraph. Thankfully they are well written but many articles on other sites do not have first paragraphs that summarise the whole article.)
The other factor is download size. If the BBC published full articles their feeds would be a lot weighter. On broadband on our desktops, no problem. On mobile phones with GPRS it bites. And that is where I use the BBC feeds most. Even more of a reason just to have a summary.
The petition should be that feed publishers understand the usage of their feeds fully and then make a choice. Feed publishers should not be told how to publish their feeds. Badgering them to include full articles is the wrong approach. Lets educate publishers so that they don’t fear the effect of full articles (strangely it is a good effect rather than the traffic sapping one publishers think it is.)
We won’t even go near the topic of RSS as an alert mechanism for so much more than just wordy articles.
