Deprecate little used fields

[tobinus]

There are two reasons why we would want fewer fields:

1. Less to read and understand for users of PodGen
2. Less code to maintain in PodGen's code base

I am considering deprecating the following fields, if they are barely used or not used at all. None of them are documented as supported by Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Deprecating means attaching a warning to them in v1.2.0, then removing them in v2.0.0. Hopefully, it should not be too difficult to add them back manually when #36 is implemented, for the occasional use.

For Podcast:

• cloud (cloud)
• ~pubsubhubbub (<atom:link rel="hub">)~ Keeping
• skip_days (skipDays)
• skip_hours (skipHours)
• subtitle (itunes:subtitle)
• ~web_master (webMaster)~ Keeping

For Episode:

• is_closed_captioned (itunes:isClosedCaptioned)
• position and related utility functions (itunes:order)
• subtitle (itunes:subtitle)

I aim to take a look some of the top charted podcasts and record how often those attributes appear. If they are not used much, then I think it is safe to assume podcast apps haven't bothered implementing support for them.

In addition, I'd like to double check with Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts and Spotify.

Edit: The list of deprecated fields has been reduced after some thought, see comment

[tobinus]

None of them mentioned in Spotify's spec, as far as I could see

[tobinus]

None of them mentioned in Google's spec

[tobinus]

None of them are mentioned in Apple's spec either, but they also say that "This page does not list all supported RSS tags, just the most important ones." But even if they're still supported, they are apparently not important for Apple.

[tobinus]

Looking through the top feeds, I've noticed some trends:

• itunes:subtitle is sometimes used on the feed-level to provide a short description. But it seems like Apple has gone away from displaying it.
• Most tools seems to just set episodes' itunes:subtitle to be a truncated version of the longer description. This adds very little value in those cases, since the podcast reader could just truncate the longer text itself.
• webMaster is in use by SoundCloud, since the owner of the podcast is not SoundCloud, but they are responsible for hosting it.
• I found a feed on FeedBurner using Pubsubhubbub, which honestly is a better way of handling feed updates than the traditional polling.
• itunes:subtitle is actually not mentioned in the usage guide of PodGen for Podcasts..?

Some thoughts:

• Setting another field for every episode is a ton more work than setting an extra field for the podcast. So the advantage of having itunes:subtitle on the podcast level may be a good deal, while it is not worth it for episodes. Even then, neither Apple, Spotify nor Google support it, so I think it should go.

• cloud, pubsubhubbub, and skipDays and skipHours are basically all directives dictating how feed updates should be done. To sum them up:

  • cloud: Old, clunky, requires XML-RPC or SOAP. In other words, no one bothers.
  • pubsubhubbub: There are vendors who support it, and they can be put to use by feed publishers fairly easily, as long as they can send an update to the hub whenever they update their feed.
  • skipDays and skipHours may not react to updates in times which are skipped, so they are way too strict and dangerous. If they had been supported, that is.

  I think it's fairly safe to say that most feed requests (polls) are unnecessary, because the feed has stayed the same. If all podcast apps and publishers implemented support for a notification (push) mechanism instead, we could conserve a lot of energy and network capacity. Since the world would be a better place with a notification mechanism, and pubsubhubbub is the best of the bunch, I'd like to keep it as a field in PodGen. (Yes, software is political :P )

• webMaster has an obvious use when the owner of a podcast is not the one who is responsible for hosting it. I'd therefore like to keep it as well.