Back in the late 90s when I was doing some Perl and ASP by day for the company and Perl/PHP by night, we had to worry a lot about the capabilities of the clients accessing our applications. At the time there was a small industry built around creating, selling, and updating a browscap.ini file which detailed the technologies a given client was known to support.
Nowadays you can do a lot of that with Javascript and whatnot. But I'm starting to wonder if we're going to need one of those for RSS feed based advertising too. The model of "choose either the ad-free partial feed or the full-content feed with ads" may become popular, but different readers strip varying amounts of HTML from the content in an effort to sanitize it.
Just a thought...
Posted by jzawodn at October 27, 2004 12:49 PM
I have been reading Obscure Store's feed for some time now; they use the syndication services of News is Free. Yesterday I noticed a few items with ADV: before the subject line, and today it seems every third or fourth item is that way; News is Free has started placing ads directy into the feed. It's a bit disconcerting.