This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz
by James Robertson.
Original Post: Why Aggregator Authors swear
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.
Ben Hammersley points to a summary of RSS by Mark Pilgrim, which documents the existence of 9 different (and incompatible) versions of RSS. This is one of the prime reasons that news aggregator authors continue to get mail asking something like this:
Your aggregator - (insert name here) - has trouble with this feed: (insert http link here)
Now, Atom was going to make this all better, right? Maybe it would have, if people hadn't insisted on deploying it before it was ready. I count myself among the guilty here - I've got Atom 0.2 feeds on this blog. In the wild, there's Atom 0.2 and 0.3 - and since the specs aren't done, there's slight variations in implementations, as different sites see the spec differently. Blogger is mandating that users pick RSS or Atom (why they can't do both is a mystery), so their take on 0.3 is likely to be semi-definitive. What does this mean? Look for the variance to get worse, and then worse again...
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