Re: RSS 1.1

On Wed, Jan 19, 2005 at 10:05:40PM -0500, Bill Kearney wrote:
> 
> From: "Christopher Schmidt" <crschmidt-ShfR2DvLQHoeIZ0/[email protected]>
> > Although I understand what you're saying with this statement, I would like
> > to point out that some aggregators do support RSS 1.1 with no changes:
> > specifically, Blam!, which uses RSS.Net for parsing, supports RSS 1.1
> > feeds with no changes at all.
> 
> Let's be VERY careful here.  It treads quite dangerously toward the problems
> associated with coddling bad tools.  That a given tool doesn't PROPERLY
> throw errors on this 1.1 format is a BAD SIGN for that tool.

I don't think this is neccesarily true. Given that any tool which is not 
RSS 1.1 specific has to have accept a wide variety of formats with a 
relatively wide spread of variation, the fact that a tool may support 
things which are not exactly what they claim to be - things which are 
almost-RSS 1.0, for example - does not neccesarily mean that the tool is 
broken.

RSS 1.1 is very close to RSS 1.0 in many ways, so it is not surprising 
that tools may handle the feeds with no changes. That was one of the 
goals in the first place: to resolve as many issues as possible with as 
few changes to the way the content was presented as possible.

The only things that a User-Agent is required to throw errors on is 
invalid XML. There are a number of other things which they may throw 
errors on, but in general we've attempted to encourage Postel's Law: "Be 
liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send." The only 
thing this does not apply to is invalid XML, which should be dumped on 
the floor. I don't have any information on what Blam does about this, 
but any tool which does not fail on invalid XML is a non-conforming 
aggregator.

> > Given the fact that there are already multiple aggregators which
> > support RSS 1.1, I think that we did relatively well in that goal.
> 
> Again, it does little to build any real credibility to base acceptance based
> on the failure to disrupt bad tools.

This part of my previous email was referring to the developers who have 
integrated changes into their tools specifically to support RSS 1.1, 
rather than tools which may, due to peculiarities of coding, support it.
JabRSS[1] and BottomFeeder[2] have both added support since the release 
of the specification. (BottomFeeder had it within 3 hours.)

[1] http://cmeerw.org/dev/taxonomy/term/1
[2] http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/BottomFeeder/

Regards,

-- 
Christopher Schmidt


 
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