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Re: Sticks, carrots, real XML, ultra-liberal parsing


Henri Sivonen wrote:

If Atom in practice ends up as something that I can't process with vanilla
XML tools and that is as soupish as RSS, I fail to see why I should want to use the feed facet Atom instead of RSS and why Atom couldn't be defined as an extension/update to RSS.

In the beginning of the web there were a decent number of programmers writing a web browser on their own - because the HTML specification was simple to implement.

Now today I reckon it would be impossible for any single person to author a browser that can be used as a replacement for Internet Explorer. Not because IE is good, but because it has a huge number of error-correcting features to deal with invalid and tag-souped markup. Basing a browser on implementing the HTML specification is no longer good enough for a browser people can use.

Isn't RSS in the same muddle - in this mailing list alone the evidence is present that creating an aggregator that implements just the RSS specification isn't enough to compete with the likes of the current range of aggregators.

What can be done to prevent Atom from being equally difficult to implement in seven or eight years? Netscape 1.0 took a few months, Netscape 6.0 took four years.

On the other hand, people *will* publish well-formed feeds (if they bother trying to publish an Atom feed at all) if the popular aggregators use real XML processors.

Will _enough_ people publish well-formed feeds? Blogging and syndication is about having a conversation within a community. Conversations involve listening. If someone is interested in having a conversation, why do they make it difficult for the listener to listen?



Devil's advocate: If we have an obligation to support invalid XML - should we just get rid of XML parsers and go back to plain text parsing? What's the argument for doing Atom in XML? Because we can, or because there's a benefit for doing so?



Mike