This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz by James Robertson. Original Post: Interesting comment on the validator 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. Latest Agile Buzz Posts Latest Agile Buzz Posts by James Robertson Latest Posts From Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants

Dare (in Sam Ruby's Comments):

Sam, Thanks for adding this to the validator. On a related note I'd like to thank you and Mark for writing the feed validator. I've lost count of the amount of times I've gotten mail or bugs filed about how some feed doesn't work in RSS Bandit which was quickly resolved by sending the person to the Feed Validator.

I don't think I'd say that sending someone to the validator solves a problem - I've taken that tack with users, more than once. It might work with a tech user; it's generally not going to wash (and hasn't washed for me) with general end users. Like it or not, users consider a failure to read available content to be a bug in the aggregator. It really doesn't matter who's fault it is; all the end user knows is that they can't read the content. That's why my tack has been to have the parser log errors but not blow up, if it's at all possible. I flag feeds with errors visibly, so that users who care can notify the source provider.

Even then, it's not that simple. I've notified source providers that there's a problem before, and more than once the issue has not been solvable by them - the error is part of the template used by their provider, and they have no easy way to fix it immediately. To my mind, simply pointing at the validator and saying "Not my problem" is punting