Article:		Parsing RSS At All Costs
Subject:		Haphazard parsing tools far worse than broken RSS feeds
Date:		2003-02-28 18:13:26
From:		Dudley Carr
I completely agree with Mark that there is no need to sit around and despair about the current state of RSS feeds. I think that the notification of faulty RSS feeds is also a decent idea, but that's only part of the solution. What I do have serious problem with is people hacking together custom solutions to parse ill-formatted RSS. As everyone knows that once a piece of software becomes used widely is extremely difficult to displace that piece of software with something better. On the other hand, an RSS feed is just a piece of data that’s changing on daily basis and can easily be fixed if broken. Solution: Everyone should use proper XML tools to parse RSS. However, until the current state of RSS feeds improve, use a tool such as HTMLTidy or something similar but more geared towards RSS. So when that magical day comes when most feeds are in a much better condition, then you can just turn off the tool for correcting crappy RSS. The benefits are several-fold: 1) A common tool for correcting bad RSS such as HTMLTidy did for HTML. 2) Eliminate the arms race for the best Regex RSS parser. 3) Normal people can keep on working under the guise of working with proper XML. 4) Partly discourage people from producing crappy RSS just b/c they’ve given up on people parsing RSS using proper XML parsers.

Previous Message

Next Message