Podlove RSS Feed Update

[eteubert]

It seems we have missed some updates to the Apple Podcast Specification in recent years. Time for an update.

We still believe, although not widely adopted, that the title/subtitle/summary metadata unit makes sense in many cases. So since Apple dropped the dedicated subtitle and summary fields, we should finally introduce the podlove namespace to RSS and move these fields there.

channel/description Usage

Currently contains podcast subtitle, plain text

RSS Spec:

A channel may contain any number of <item>s. An item may represent a "story" -- much like a story in a newspaper or magazine; if so its description is a synopsis of the story, and the link points to the full story.

Which would suggest something like our subtitle, but is this how the field is used in the real world by clients?

Apple Spec:

The show description.

Where description is text containing one or more sentences describing your podcast to potential listeners. The maximum amount of text allowed for this tag is 4000 bytes.

To include links in your description or rich HTML, adhere to the following technical guidelines: enclose all portions of your XML that contain embedded HTML in a CDATA section to prevent formatting issues, and to ensure proper link functionality.

Suggestion: use the podcast summary instead, and apply CDATA. Since we will want to use the podcast summary for podlove:summary too, maybe strip tags to turn it into plain text?

item/description Usage

Currently contains episode summary, CDATA

Apple Spec:

An episode description.

description is text containing one or more sentences describing your episode to potential listeners. You can specify up to 4000 bytes. You can use rich text formatting and some HTML (<p>, <ol>, <ul>, <li>, <a>) if wrapped in the <CDATA> tag.

To include links in your description or rich HTML, adhere to the following technical guidelines: enclose all portions of your XML that contain embedded HTML in a CDATA section to prevent formatting issues, and to ensure proper link functionality.

Suggestion: no change. This seems up to date.

Removal of deprecated tags

For both channel and item:

• remove itunes:subtitle
• remove itunes:summary
• introduce podlove:subtitle, replacing itunes:subtitle (or request a podcast:subtitle field)
• introduce podlove:summary, replacing itunes:summary (or use the existing podcast:summary field)

Publisher UI

Make the subtitle fields opt-in, since it's now an "expert feature" that only has an effect when using templates etc.

podlove RSS namespace

• define URL for specification
  • suggestion: https://podlove.org/rss
  • redirect to a GitHub repo with the specification as a Markdown file
• write specification