Re: [syndication] O'Reilly's "Content Syndication with XML and RSS"

[Julian Bond <julian_bond@voidstar.com>]

In article <87wuundrn7.fsf@openprivacy.org>, burton@openprivacy.org
writes
>Specifically some of the RSS readers can't handle valid XML.
>For example:
>
>http://relativity.yi.org/rss/index.rss
>
>This uses explicit CDATA sections (100% valid XML) for descriptions but a number
>of RSS tools can't handle it.  Specifically Radio Userland.
>
>I think that it needs to be strongly worded that if you want to use RSS, use an
>XML parser.  Do not try to parse RSS by hand.

Well, yes. But IMHO, at least part of the success of RSS in the
marketplace was that it was so easy to parse that all you needed was a
few string manipulation functions and maybe some regex. All those PHP
driven sites like Postnuke would never have managed RSS, as PHP was a
little late to the party with a good XML Parser.

>Also... don't encode HTML entities within your title elements.

I think you mis-spelt "include" when you wrote "encode". And as the
biggest cause of damaged RSS is unencoded "&"s, this is dangerous
advice. Perhaps you'd like to clarify what you were getting at.

I have a sort of background beef that RSS is essentially an envelope in
XML around a package that is just a collection of arbitrary bytes. It's
mildly irritating that in order to transport that package, the package
itself has to be transformed into valid XML. This has led to a whole
bunch of stupidity about entities, doctypes, dtds, and practices like
double encoding (& becomes &amp;amp;). I don't expect this to change and
maybe it's actually an argument about XML. But it's one that applies not
just to RSS but to all XML formats and protocols such as SOAP, XMLRPC,
Jabber and OPML that are frequently used to get a payload from one place
to another.

-- 
Julian Bond    email: julian_bond@voidstar.com
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