Paolo Valdemarin emailed me late last night from Italy with a really good best-practices type idea for the <source> element in RSS. It goes like this.

The source element was invented for programs that are both an aggregator and weblog tool, like Radio (I'm sure there will be others) or for a generalized interface between aggregators and weblog tools. When you post an item from the aggregator to the weblog, a source element is automatically generated, so in the RSS feed it's evident where the original content came from.

Now, when the source element was invented, in 0.92, there was no guid, that came in 2.0. So Paolo posits, why shouldn't the source element contain the value of the guid if it is a permalink? That way the RSS feed would point to the specific post that was being quoted, if the information is available in the source feed.

My opinion: Indeed. It should. Consider this an RFC.

# Posted by Dave Winer on 5/17/03; 8:28:19 AM - --