[pmwiki-users] RSS: please explain

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Thu, Mar 10, 2005 at 10:36:13AM +0000, Hans wrote:
> Hi,
> I confess that I am puzzled about RSS.
> I read the relevant pages on pmwiki.org and have some idea that
> action=rss should provide a page with headlines and a short
> description (i.e. first line of pages)

Others have commented about how RSS works, I'd like to pose a
different problem/question -- namely, how can we provide good
automated summaries of
   - a document's contents
   - the effects of a recent edit

Note that PmWiki already supports a (:description:) markup --
it wouldn't be hard to get RSS feeds and other page listings to
automatically add the description to the output.  The hard part
is getting (:description:) filled with useful content.

It would also be possible to have (:description:) automatically filled
with the first paragraph of text whenever a (:description:) directive
isn't specified, much as a page's title automatically comes from its
name when a (:title:) directive isn't specified.

For documenting the effects of recent edits, the best I can come up with
is to standardize the "change summary" recipe
(http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Cookbook/ChangeSummary).  But somehow that
seems like just a rough approximation and that there ought to be
something better.

Pm