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>You're kidding, right?
No, but that is because I'm not really viewing an aggregator as a tool in itself, I don't think aggregators have much of a business future. I think they're destined to become part of other products.
>Then the user hears about another aggregator, a >direct competitor, which claims to be able to >let them follow *all* the sites they care about. >It doesn't complain; it doesn't whine; it >doesn't suggest that they work around the >developer's laziness by firing off emails to >random people they've never met. It just works.
Again, I don't believe in aggregators as stand-alone tools, I believe that they will become part of more wide-ranging products.
If such a product has to do with handling XML of widely different formats then it cannot devote development resources to handling stuff that thinks it's XML but really isn't.
A product can provide add-ins to convert legacy formats, but I don't think badly formed RSS will qualify for such attentions.
If such a product is the object then the well-formedness of the XML becomes integral to the product, development will have to provide ways to error report problems with individual XML instances, such as those originating from a feed.
This is not developer laziness, but developer ambition.
Error reporting to a user has always seemed to me to be an exercise in the art of communication. If a non-technical user receives the error message
"XML error at
hello world " then they might well be expected to say "This program sucks" if on the other hand they receive information like "Newsfeed at http://www.myinfo.com/newsfeed7 is not conforming to the technical standards for newsfeeds, if you would like to learn more click More Info" then I would expect the user to think something like "Frigging amateurs at www.myinfo.com" despite not automatically fixing www.myinfo.com for the user the program may still command market share if it does enough other things with various other XML technologies. This may cause you to think again that I'm kidding but I'm not, I think a lot of these problems stem from the technical communities believe that the end user is an idiot. The end user may not understand XML or any other standard, but I have faith enough in the intelligence of people to understand a claim that such and such a thing does not conform to a standard.
But I guess we can't agree on that matter.
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