Comments on: Feed on Feeds 0.1.7

By: The Indiana Jones School of Management

The Indiana Jones School of Management — Sun, 12 Jun 2005 00:47:48 +0000

FeedLounge: Tagging and Renaming

Two things I’m really, really loving about Feedlounge:

Tagging feeds. As Dougal notes, you can tag feeds to give you clouds of feeds. He uses the “perl programming” “php programming” example, which really should be a…

By: Geof F. Morris

Geof F. Morris — Thu, 24 Jun 2004 13:03:21 +0000

“Because they’re publishing rubbish.” And the argument’s full circle.

Thanks for playing, folks. You can continue arguing about this elsewhere in fora where it matters. Out here in End Userville, though …

By: Danny

Danny — Thu, 24 Jun 2004 11:04:47 +0000

Q. “Why won’t my aggregator pick up Site X?”
A. Because they’re publishing rubbish.

It’s not something that has really shown itself much yet (stock tickers aside), but the silent omission or modification of data is potentially way more troublesome than not being able to read a feed.

By: Charles Miller

Charles Miller — Wed, 23 Jun 2004 22:20:50 +0000

Ouch. That sounds painful. I bet The Register is inking an article about it right now: “Blog Linking Makes You Go Blind!”

By: Geof F. Morris

Geof F. Morris — Wed, 23 Jun 2004 15:18:00 +0000

Oh, and thanks to Mark for linking me. My eyeballs popped out when I saw 240 referrals overnight.

By: Geof F. Morris

Geof F. Morris — Wed, 23 Jun 2004 15:17:15 +0000

Gentlemen: Your niggling aside—I’m an ace niggler when I know the details, so it isn’t unappreciated—is pretty irrelevant. What is relevant is that a couple bad characters in someone’s feed cause me not to see updates from them for as many entries as it takes their feed to stop choking. Would it be great if they sent compliant feeds? Yes. Is it expected? Yes. Is it reasonable? No.

Hell, when I last looked at the feeds I aggregate, one of mine was horking.

And end-user’s not going to give a shit about Postel’s Law, whether XML is robust, or whether birds flew out of Dave Winer’s ass when Pilgrim needled him again. He’ll just wonder, “Why won’t my aggregator pick up Site X?”

And I know this because I deal with these end-users, folks. My rmfo-blogs service offers a pass-protected FoF install, and I have users asking me all the time why stuff doesn’t work. I’m geek enough to know why, so they ask me, but when, at the end of the day, I have to say, “It’s because of the technology,” all they can do is huff.

Ya know?

By: Danny

Danny — Wed, 23 Jun 2004 13:40:16 +0000

The distinction is significant: Postel’s Law is about robustness, and XML isn’t designed to be robust.

Sure, the application as a whole should be robust, but if you’re talking about liberal parsing, you’re no longer talking about XML.

The XML approach is summed up in RFC 3470: “When specifying the handing of erroneous XML protocol elements, a protocol design must never recommend attempting to partially interpret non-well-formed instances of an element which is required to be XML. Reasonable behaviors in such a scenario could include attempting retransmission or aborting an in-progress session.”

It’s too late to do much about RSS, years of multiple incompatible specs have meant that a liberal parser is pretty well essential.

Looking forwards, if Atom is to use XML, then a parser should respect these “reasonable behaviours”, not mangle XML into something it isn’t or encourage bad data by accepting it.

This doesn’t mean a worse experience for the end user, but a better one, as the data will tend overall to be more reliable.

By: Yoz

Yoz — Wed, 23 Jun 2004 11:20:55 +0000

Don: The distinction is irrelevant. It’s just a good guiding principle. If an app is strict where it could be liberal (without affecting data quality) then it’s the end user who suffers most.

By: Don Ulrich

Don Ulrich — Wed, 23 Jun 2004 04:32:08 +0000

Postels law is not a law at all. It was one line from a RFC about TCP and is out of context for this application. You are dealing with XML NOT Tcp.

By: steve minutillo

steve minutillo — Tue, 22 Jun 2004 20:55:48 +0000

I don’t think you can do it in any clean way, you’d have to launch Python and the feed parser as a seperate process and read/write data to it through STDIN and STDOUT. Ugly.

By: Geof F. Morris

Geof F. Morris — Tue, 22 Jun 2004 20:32:34 +0000

:chuckle: Can one call a Python lib with a PHP script? I mean, I don’t know why you couldn’t, but then what I know about practical PHP can be written in foot-high letters on my left thumbnail…

By: steve minutillo

steve minutillo — Tue, 22 Jun 2004 20:27:36 +0000

Yeah, ultra-liberal parsing would sure be nice. Back when I started on FoF, I could have just as easily started out in Python, then I could use Mark’s parser. I don’t even remember what made me choose PHP… probably Jeff Goldblum, or a butterfly flapping its wings over Moscow, or something along those lines.