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Tom Myers wrote:
Maybe every valid Atom feed, within what it introspects for,
_must_ have a validation-complaint-URI,
either a mailto: to be used in the form
I absolutely LOVE that idea in principle - if the spec enforces some
kind of "inform this address of errors" people won't have a chance of
releasing invalid feeds without realising. In practise though, I'm not
sure if it's possible. First of all, no one wants to give out email
addresses in a machine readable format in this day and age. A "contact
me" form is slightly better, but requires more work on behalf of the
feed implementor, could easily end up broken / no longer at the
specified URL, and is also prone to spam if some spammer smarts up to
the idea of gathering Atom feeds and firing bogus complaints at them.
There's also the problem of what could amount to a distributed DoS on
anyone with a lot of traffic who accidentally invalidates their feed.
Can you imagine if someone with a thousand subscribers dropped an
unescaped ampersand in to their Atom feed? Within the hour they would
have 1,000 error reports to wade through (assuming all aggregators
followed the report-error part of the standard).
A better practical solution is probably to follow Bill Kearney's example
in having a big directory of Atom feeds which publically flags any that
are broken, gently embaressing the owner in to fixing the feed.