Re: Media RSS Brokeness

Randy Morin wrote:
> To our Yahoo! friends. We need the Media RSS namespace URI fixed.
> http://www.therssweblog.com/?guid=20070929094626
> This has been broken now for 8 months, maybe more, maybe a lot more.

A lot more. If you look at the web page archives in the Wayback Machine, 
you'll see it's been broken for years - they just change the way in which 
it's broken from time to time.

The first date for which the Wayback Machine has an entry for the spec is 
October 1, 2005. At that point the namespace was given as 
http://search.yahoo.com/mrss (no trailing slash), meaning it was already 
"broken" back then. At that time, though, the choice of URI may have been 
deliberate.

By November 24, 2005 the namespace had been changed to 
http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/ (with a trailing slash). Although there was no 
mention of this change in "Change Notes", I believe it was deliberate, and 
that was intended to be the official URI from then on.

Unfortunately they only managed to keep the documentation correct for about 
2 months.

By February 1, 2006 it was broken again. In the introduction to the spec, 
the namespace was documented as http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/ (with a 
trailing slash), but all the examples used a URI of 
http://search.yahoo.com/mrss (no trailing slash).

Then in May 23, 2007, after months of complaints, someone decided to try and 
fix the problem by getting the examples and the text to match. 
Unfortunately, whoever made the changes didn't know what the correct URI was 
supposed to be (who can blame them) and set everything to 
http://search.yahoo.com/mrss (no trailing slash).

At this point, I don't think the spec can be fixed. Both forms of the 
namespace are widely used, and even if Yahoo! eventually gets around to 
updating the documentation, there will still be other tutorials all over the 
Internet telling people to use the wrong URI.

IMO, the best thing to do is acknowledge that the spec is broken. Document 
both URIs that are in use so clients will know what to expect, but recommend 
feed publishers use the "correct" one (whichever they decide that to be).

Regards
James



 
Yahoo! Groups Links

<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
    http://groups.yahoo.com/group/rss-public/

<*> Your email settings:
    Individual Email | Traditional

<*> To change settings online go to:
    http://groups.yahoo.com/group/rss-public/join
    (Yahoo! ID required)

<*> To change settings via email:
    mailto:[email protected] 
    mailto:[email protected]

<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
    [email protected]

<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
    http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/