Parsing RSS At All Costs ?
Luke Hutteman complains about ABC News providing RSS Feeds that do not stick to RSS Standards (use of exotic date formats and weird namespaces declarations, lack of mandatory elements). He also mentions the "Parse RSS At All Costs" article of Mark Pilgrim, which I immediately read.
Since there are some RSS Feeds (10% according to him) that aren't well-formed XML, Mark proposes to NOT use an XML Parser to manipulate feeds content, but use regular expressions... WTF ?!? Even if I agree with him that RSS readers should try all possible solutions to extract datas (in many different elements or different hierarchical structure), I really don't think that we (RSS Reader makers) should try to parse not XML well-formed feeds... They're totally killing the definition of standard and XML... Dare Obasanjo (the famous RSS Bandit maker) left some comments :
Encouraging consumers of XML to support ill-formed XML reduces the power of XML and induces fragmentation. If we arbitrarily pick bits and pieces of a standard to support then we cheapen the technology and reduce it to worthlessness.
I'd hate to see XML on the 'web reduced to HTML during the browser wars with people simply checking if "it works well with Mark Pilgrim's program" or creating ill-formed markup simply to satisfy broken tools.
I totally agree with Dare. A lot more comments were posted, but Dare and Mark couldn't agree... Anyway, if you're reading this and you're publishing your website content with RSS, please, provide at least well-formed XML... You can use RDF, RSS, or any other well-known format, but please, produce parsable XML !!