How can I mark an RSS item "expired"?

Question

I'm working on a (web page / RSS feed / form in a winapp) to show current system status and recent updates.

I'd like to know when an open issue is resolved, so that it can be drawn with strike through. This will let the users know the issue is resolved, but keep it on the list. I know it would be easier to remove it, but I want the users to see that it got resolved.

I haven't seen an "expiration date" on any RSS or ATOM standards, but one thing I learned is that another set (or many sets) of eyes, can read things differently. If no expires tag exists, I'll find another way to get the information for the web and winform, but RSS fead readers may not display it properly.

Answer 1

I don't know of anything in the specifications like that (though I glanced again, just to be sure).

Perhaps a somewhat coarser (but very cross-platform) solution is in order:

if ($status == 'expired') {
 $title = 'EXPIRED! ' . $title;
 $body = '*** EXPIRED! ***' . $body . '*** EXPIRED! ***';
}

Answer 2

D'oh!

Thanks to David's comment, I switched to "accounting" mode.

the idea is that once a representation of an item appears in the RSS feed, it will always forevermore be an accurate representation of

This matches up to accounting transactions. You never change an account balance. You add (never remove) transactions to modify the resulting balance.

The tag of ATOM could be used to tie the updates back to the original entry.

While doing some research on RSS and ATOM readers, I kept coming across comments about update tags not being honored. (An updated item wasn't re-read by the reader and the old version was always displayed)

All that said. It might be nice in some future version or RSS and/or ATOM to have a way to indicate that something is out of date and the information may not be useful anymore. One of my pet peeves with sites that send out a feed item pointing to an article that has since been moved or deleted.

Answer 3

You can use Microsoft Simple Sharing Extensions to specify that feed is a complete list and anything not in it, does not exist.

There is also Atom Tombstones draft.

And for backward compatibility you can simply updte item with information that it's expired.

I'd use Atom for that – in my experience aggregators have more respect for Atom's <id> and don't duplicate items when their title changes.