Re: Re: The Profile and the Feed Validator

Sam Ruby wrote:
> James Holderness wrote:
>> I think that's going too far. The issue is far more complicated than the
>> profile might suggest.
>
> I previously was told that "We will vigorously defend the profile's
> guidance".  It that guidance is as incomplete as you indicate, then I
> would then suggest that the profile be updated to accurately reflect the
> issue.

I was initially in favour of more detail, but the argument was made that too 
much information would just be confusing, and I think that's a valid point. 
We could have something like: "if your title looks like this, then do A, B 
or C; but if your title looks like that, then you should do C, D or E." Or 
we could just say: "the safest option is C". The latter is a whole lot 
easier to understand.

Now I'm quite happy to defend that advice for someone creating a feed, but 
that doesn't mean it's a good blueprint for a validator.

Perhaps the spec shouldn't have used an uppercase SHOULD in that section. 
Certainly if the feedvalidator is going to treat every SHOULD as a warning 
that would be a problem. Here's one way to look at it though: in the words 
of RFC 2119, there may exist valid reasons in particular circumstances to 
ignore that recommendation (there are). If the feedvalidator were programmed 
to know what those particular circumstances were, it could avoid giving a 
warning.

> If this profile is
> ratified, many, many, many feeds that work just fine with GoogleReader
> and My Yahoo won't conform to the profile; and some of the suggestions
> made, if implemented, will break usage with these important aggregators.

Under certain conditions that can't be helped. Whatever you do, someone's 
aggregator is going to break. The recommendations in the profile favour 
those aggregators that have implemented the spec correctly. Given that my 
aggregator happens to be one of the *incorrect* ones, I'm not exactly 
thrilled by that, but it's a tough sell arguing that we should recommend 
something that would break aggregators that are doing the *right* thing.

Regards
James



 
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