Re: Re: The Profile and the Feed Validator

rcade wrote:
> 
> We will vigorously defend the profile's guidance. By calling this
> stuff the best practices for RSS, we're opening ourselves up to
> challenge whenever we run into an implementer who believes otherwise.
> I think that's a dialogue we ought to be having in the RSS community.
> If the validator reinforces our advice, it will force the issue on all
> of the big stuff -- enclosures, relative URLs, yadda yadda yadda.

Continuing this discussion, the validator and the profile are already
largely aligned on two of the "big stuff" items: enclosures and relative
URLs.  As far as titles goes, here's a first pass at tests for how an
ampersand should be coded:

  = = =

Conforming to the profile:

<title>AT&#x26;T</title>

Not conforming to the profile:

<title>AT&amp;T</title>
<title>AT&#38;T</title>
<title>AT&amp;#x26;T</title>
<title>AT&amp;#38;T</title>
<title>AT&amp;amp;T</title>
<title><![CDATA[AT&T]]></title>
<title><![CDATA[AT&amp;T]]></title>

Conforming to the profile, and therefore produce no warning, but may not
produce what you expect:

<title>AT&#x26;amp;T</title>

Unclear whether the following conforms or not, so probably does not
produce warnings:

<title>AT&#X26;T</title>
<title><![CDATA[AT&#x26;T]]></title>

  = = =

The reason why I am being so explicit about this up front is simple: I
honestly don't think many of the existing producers of RSS 2.0 feeds
will produce feeds that conform to this aspect of the profile.  I also
suspect that conforming to the profile in this area may not be as easy
as you might expect.  I realize that the profile has not been ratified,
but IMHO, an exercise each of the board members should undertake before
they cast a vote is to create a single weblog post in each of their
respective blogs that contains either a ampersand or a less than sign in
a title and then see what it takes to make their feed conform to the
proposed profile.  A concrete and current example that involves both a
board member and feedburner can be found here:

   http://feeds.feedburner.com/Iblogthere4im

Again, let me emphasize that I fully realize that the profile has not
yet been ratified.  I'm just suggesting that it might be a good idea to 
lead by example in this area, particularly now that the voting on this 
matter is about to start.

If it would help in this exercise, I could deploy a version of the feed
validator that has been updated to perform these checks at
beta.feedvalidator.org.

- Sam Ruby



 
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