Re: well-formedness error

[Sam Ruby <rubys@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Danny Ayers wrote:
> James Robertson wrote:
>
> > Yes, and the simple problem is that on a hosted site it's easy for the 
> > headers to not match what the feed has.
>
> So we need to figure out strategies to minimise the occurrence of this. 
> For the most part, the software that is generating the feed should look 
> after it, either programmatically or by adding corrective .htaccess files.

Boiled down, the problem is that there is a default charset assumed for 
content types of the form "text/*", and furthermore there is an 
assumption that HTTP intermediaries are allowed to change the charset of 
the content, and if they do so, their only obligation is to adjust the 
HTTP headers to match.

There is no such default and assumption with mime types of the form 
"application/*".

> > This is one of the (many) reasons that aggregator developers have to 
> > be lenient with malformed content.
>
> Aggregator developers don't have to be lenient, it's a choice. My own 
> choice to date has leaned towards being lenient with RSS feeds (although 
> I can't honestly remember the last time I encountered the 
> wrong-mime-type problem), but I would prefer to be strict with Atom 
> feeds. As an aggregator user I would prefer to use a tool with useful 
> features rather than one that sacrificed them for cleaning up bad feeds.

If the Atom spec is clear on this (and I don't merely mean indirectly 
via specs referenced by the XML specification that seem to be routinely 
ignored), I will ensure that the feedvalidator checks for this condition.

- Sam Ruby