Re: Re: The Profile and the Feed Validator

James Holderness wrote:
> 
> 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 
> <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).

I think that's backwards.  Here's a title:

<title>I bought some AT&amp;T; it went up.</title>

With some aggregator/browser combinations, there will be an attempt to 
look up an entity named "T".  Fewer would do so if &#x26; was 
substituted in place of &amp;.

>  > 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).

Again, I think that's backwards; but we don't need to theorize.  I've 
deployed a test version of the feedvalidator at beta.feedvalidator.org; 
I've looked at the output of a number of feeds, and don't see the 
problem of which you speak.  Can you provide a few examples of 
non-artificial feeds for which the beta feedvalidator presents advice 
that isn't warranted?

> (for example, something like the UFP markup detection code).

I plan to update the UFP to only do that detection on feeds that do not 
have the magic string "&#x" in them.  I would then be parsing all feeds 
that conform to the profile correctly, and would be applying the best 
heuristics I have come up with to date on the rest.

- Sam Ruby


 
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