MetaTalk RSS: TTL tag missing

February 2, 2006 12:21 PM

TTL tag is missing in MetaTalk RSS (and possibly other feeds) but not the main Metafilter feed.
posted by blue_beetle to Bugs at 12:21 PM (8 comments total)

the MetaTalk RSS isn't 2.0, so there's no TTL tag at the moment.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 12:35 PM on February 2, 2006

FeedDemon is the only RSS reader in the land that supports TTL, for good reason. It's a waste of space.
posted by cillit bang at 1:42 PM on February 2, 2006

I mention it because Internet Explorer 7.0 enforces it, and while I don't like it, I do support consistancy at all costs.
posted by blue_beetle at 2:05 PM on February 2, 2006

Enforces in what sense?
posted by smackfu at 2:20 PM on February 2, 2006

Enforces in the sense that it will not allow you to set the auto-refresh on an RSS feed to less than the TTL, but it will requery the feed based on the TTL.
posted by blue_beetle at 2:29 PM on February 2, 2006

I know this is becoming increasingly non-MeFi related, but just for the sake of it, here is a picture of the settings for IE7s built in RSS reader. Feeds without a TTL specified are not limited to a "Feed Minimum" (you can chose say 15min for MetaTalk).


posted by blue_beetle at 2:34 PM on February 2, 2006

Well that's ridiculous because TTL isn't defined by the RSS spec as a "feed minimum" refresh frequency:

It's a number of minutes that indicates how long a channel can be cached before refreshing from the source.

Not "must be" or even "should be". If anything it's a maximum - ie refreshing less often than this is an error.
posted by cillit bang at 2:43 PM on February 2, 2006

Thank God for that feature. Must have been requested by tons of people in their user testing.

"I really like the RSS integration, but where's the TTL restriction?"
posted by yerfatma at 5:20 AM on February 3, 2006