This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz
by James Robertson.
Original Post: Raging against nothing
Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants
Feed URL: http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/rssBlog/rssBlogView.xml
Feed Description: James Robertson comments on Cincom Smalltalk, the Smalltalk development community, and IT trends and issues in general.
NetNewsWire creator Brent Simmons recently announced that NetNewsWire's future support for Atom will require Atom feeds to be well-formed. Some people aren't too happy about this, claiming that he's applying a double standard that will make Atom appear less useful than RSS.
So, I'll add to the stink by stating that my plan is the same as Brent's. FeedDemon will also support Atom, but if an Atom feed isn't well-formed XML, FeedDemon will display an error rather than try to parse it. In fairness I have to consider this decision open to input from my customers, but I want to explain why I believe this is important.
I'm already off the reservation with BottomFeeder. It doesn't handle anything thrown at it, but it does ignore as many problems as it can. I use the standard VisualWorks XML Parser, but I do intercept and ignore a bunch of the error conditions. Why? Because it's an end user tool, and many of the end users are never going to report the problem as malformed xml - not to me, and not to the author of the bad feed. What they'll actually do is hunt around for a replacement aggregator that will handle the bad feed. That's the reality of it, and all the hand waving in the world isn't going to change it.
I'm not about to use a different set of code to deal with Atom than I do with RSS either - especially since Atom is the same blasted thing, with slightly different tag names.
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