Re: Re: The Profile and the Feed Validator

Sam Ruby wrote:
> James Holderness wrote:
>> 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.
>
> Citation?

http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/rss-public/message/1491

> From what I can recall, the current text is based on what works best
> with existing, popular aggregators.  Or to put it another another way,
> other forms of encoding of things like RSS 2.0 titles and category names
> simply don't work as well.

It depends what you're trying to represent. For most titles, there are 
several forms of encoding that work equally well. However there are some 
rare titles (namely those discussing markup) that are best represented in 
one particular way (assuming you want your feed to be valid).

> What do you think about Rogers' comment that "If the validator
> reinforces our advice, it will force the issue on all of the big 
> stuff..."?

I'm not sure that the validator should be "reinforcing" this particular 
piece of advice. That doesn't mean I think it's bad advice. It's good advice 
for someone seeking advice. It's not necessarily good advice for someone 
that already knows what they are doing and has specifically chosen a 
different solution.

>> If the feedvalidator were programmed
>> to know what those particular circumstances were, it could avoid giving a
>> warning.
>
> If people pop up with advice as to what those other circumstances might
> be, I will point them to this mailing list.

As mentioned above, any title that isn't discussing markup (i.e. most of 
them).

If the validator does give a warning for such titles, and the producer of 
the feed changes their title to comply with the recommendation, that won't 
be a bad thing. However, you can be sure there will be some people that will 
complain bitterly about such warnings. That's what I'd like to avoid.

> Observation: "&#x" is a relatively unlikely string to accidentally occur
> in a feed.  If present anywhere in the feed, it could be taken as an
> indication that character data outside of description and
> content:encoded elements are not to be treated as HTML.

I'm not exactly sure what you're saying. Here are some example titles:

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

<title>I hate the &#x3C;b&#x3E; tag</title>
<title>Second &#x3C;b&#x3E;word&#x3C;/b&#x3E; bold</title>

All of them contain the string "&#x". What does that tell me about those 
titles?

Anyway, that sort of thing wouldn't really be feasible for me. By the time 
my rss parser sees the title content the XML parser would have already 
decoded any entities. I could request the data in it's raw XML encoding, and 
decode it at a higher level when necessary, but that just seems more trouble 
than it's worth. I can think of better ways to improve my title handling 
(for example, something like the UFP markup detection code).

Regards
James



 
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