This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz
by Adam Green.
Original Post: Who says RSS is a standard?
Feed Title: ruby.darwinianweb.com
Feed URL: http://www.nemesis-one.com/rss.xml
Feed Description: Adam Green's Ruby development site
Authors of real RSS aggregators are always complaining about the lack of adherence to any type of standards in feeds, and now I'm beginning to appreciate their frustration. I was expecting to have to deal with differences between RSS and Atom format, but the issue of dates is particularly bad. First of all, it appears that RSS 0.91 doesn't even include dates with the feed items. This wouldn't be a problem if RubyRiver was listing each feed separately, because the relative position of the items would translate into the order in the aggregator. RubyRiver, however, is going to display all the feeds merged into a single list, so the date is essential for ordering the items. RSS 2.0 is supposed to include dates, but out of 15 samples, I found one that doesn't include dates. I also found 2 that used the Dublin Core <dc:date> tag, when the RSS 2.0 spec calls for <pubDate>. I also found 2 RDF feeds that use the RSS 2.0 date formatting. All these variations will make things more complicated, but they shouldn't stop me. I'm also going to email the authors of the feeds with no dates and suggest they move up to RSS 2.0 or RDF.
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