RSS feed only displays text

Question

I have an rss reader app which works perfectly on some feeds, but on others it just displays text and no images.

Is it the feed which should be adjusted to publish images or Im sure it is something with the way I read the stream.

Why does it work for some streams(shows entire posts, images, videos etc. from e.g. blogspot rss feeds) but not for other rss feeds?

I have read that the stream itself can be set to publish different content amounts.

How can I parse the feed so that all feeds will work correctly?

Answer 1

It's very likely that it's due to the feed themselves... and not to the reader app. Feed publisher can decide whether they want to include all or parts only of their content in their feeds (RSS or Atom). Then, even if they publish all the content, they may decide to publish it as raw text (just the text content) or full XHTML, which would allow the inclusion of images.

Unfortunately, there is little that you can do, except maybe ask the developer of your app to allow to show the original site/page and not just the feed entries.

Answer 2

Ok, so what are the differences between the feeds that work and the feeds that don't? What assumptions do you make about the RSS content, and in what situations are those assumptions not satisfied? When you run the code in the debugger, what do you see when you encounter a feed where images don't work? Also, what code? ;)