On truncating abstracts, descriptions, excerpts, whatever you want to call them… +
TLDR version: You can not, must not — and hence — will not truncate any larger body of text in the middle of a word. Let the people read the whole sentence, or at least the whole word… God forbid you add an ellipsis indicating more stuff is there…
The scenario is pretty stupid (and unfortunately all too common these days): A web site decides to publish certain parts of their content in an RSS feed. The stupid part being that they decide to limit the amount of content in the feed in hopes of folks clicking the link and reading the whole thing on the site. OK — resistance is futile — that’s just the way it is.
[Yes, I know there are sites that have valid reasons for such an approach. We’re not talking about those here]
But, how stupid do you have to be to not realize that with code along the lines of:
$abstract = substr($body_of_text, 0, ABSTRACT_LENGTH_LIMIT); |
you’re bound to end up with chopped up: words, sentences, dates, times, people’s names, god-knows-what-else?
[replace the above PHP code with any language you want, the principle is the same]
Does that thought never cross anyone’s mind? Is that an advanced concept people cannot grasp? If it is I need to find a way to make money of it…
Anyway, crap like that gets served to the “readers”. Worse yet, the web site proudly displays their RSS 2.0 (oh, look, 2.0!) badge on the footer of every page on the site (BTW, how hard is it to add a bloody autodiscovery <link>? You can slap a badge in the footer, but not in the <head>? I don’t get it.), the CMS generating that crap is happily adding a “generated by” comment in the feed itself… Pathetic.
