Re: RSS 1.1

--- In [email protected], "Bill Kearney" <ml_yahoo@i...> wrote:

> Madness.  Just plain madness.  Have we not drilled this insanity
out of
> developer's heads already?  Why are so many people putting such
energies
> into working around stupid shit like badly formatted feeds instead
of just
> fixing them or the tools making them?

Bill,

I share your sentiment and also think that developers should take
standards compliance more seriously.

The philosphy which you call "madness" is very common and 
usually summed up with the phrase:

"Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send"

I think it is reasonable approach to get around in imperfect world
where many tools are just out of your control and you could not fix
them all.

Bit of personal history: Few years ago for one of projects we have to
write HTML parser. I wrote it to follow HTML spec to the letter
(including some obscure aspects coming from SGML heritage). I wrote
unit tests and run it through various HTML test suites to ensure it is
compliant to the standard. Once we tried to use it on real web pages,
I found out to my horror that roughly 80-90% of common web pages are
not valid according to HTML spec. When we spent weeks doing various
heuristics and workarounds to make it work properly on most pages we
need to process. Next problem was that popular web browser (IE and
Netscape at the time) were using different heuristics and error
recovery strategies and same broken page was still shown in them,
albeit slightly differently. We had to figure out and emulate the
behavior of most of them. That was what I call  "plain madness".

But what option did I have? To tell my customers that the 80% of web
pages they are viewing in their browser do not follow HTML standard
and we could not process them?

Vadim






 
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