Re: [amphetadesk-develop] Re: Broken RSS feeds....would like the option of turning on XML fixing

[Bill K. <wke...@ho...>]

> One new feature I am not so happy with and which  I think will become
> increasingly troublesome, is the removal of the XML fixing routine, which
> cleans up poorly formed RSS feeds. At present I have 87 channels and
> depending on the day, 10% or more of the channels may have broken due to XML
> problems. There is generally no rhyme or reason to which channels will fail.
> The large sites such as The Register and Slashdot are just as susceptible as
> the smaller ones.

> My theory is  most applications that generate RSS XML do not validate the
> XML when they create file. Considering that most of these tools are
> weblog/personal publishing systems such as Radio Userland, MovableType, it
> is very likely that all manner of random HTML tags, etc get added to the RSS
> feed, breaking it.

You are correct, quite a lot of the output code from these environments is NOT
created with a genuine XML handling routine.  Most of them are just text print
functions simulating XML.

> Would it not be better to include the XML cleaner routines, or at least have
> the option to turn these on?

Wouldn't it be better to get those sties to FIX their output?  I've found that
by contacting the site authors AND the toolkit developers the quality of the XML
feeds has been, slowly but sure, improving.

Find the feed on Syndic8 and see if it's already reported as 'awaiting repair'.
If not, bump a message to the sy...@ya... mailing list and an editor
will see about marking the feed.  Meanwhile, I've found that sending a polite
e-mail message to the authors of the site (and the toolkit maker) has often
resulted in them fixing it and being grateful you brought it to their attention.

I'm with you in thinking about going the easy route and installing
code-workarounds.  But I'm suggesting that temptation be avoided.  The fixes for
most of them are little more than some very easy to add wrapping functions and
other very trivial little checks.

-Bill Kearney