Friday May 06, 2005 Random ramblings
Friday May 06, 2005 Sigh.. all too often I see the following in my RSS reader (liferea):
There were errors while parsing this feed. The following error occurred:Entity: line 61: parser error : EntityRef: expecting ';'Microsoft Peddles Unused R&D To Eager Startups ^ You may want to validate the feed using FeedValidator.
If you're writing an RSS generator (no matter which kind): Encapsulate user-supplied data in CDATA. The title, the description, the author's name, everything, and most especially the actual item entry.
That's worth saying again: USE CDATA!!!
It's amazing how many badly broken RSS generators there are out there. Then there are the aggregators that try to aggregrate all these god-awful broken RSS XML feeds into a single feed, often re-escaping possibly already escaped HTML entitities rather than just USING CDATA LIKE THEY SHOULD. It's not even like outputting good robust RSS/XML is that difficult, if you just blinking USE CDATA TO ESCAPE USER SUPPLIED CONTENT.
There's a lot more to rant about wrt RSS generators and aggregators, eg the damn annoying tendencies of some generators and many aggregators to keep changing the 'pubDate' attribute (no no no, change lastUpdated), but hopefully Atom will fix that.
end-rant
( May 06 2005, 03:18:28 AM IST ) Permalink Comments [0]
