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Well-formed Atom Feeds Only, says Nick

And I agree with him. Nick Bradbury, FeedDemon's author, makes a great point about Atom feeds vs. RSS feeds in a couple of good posts:

When I started coding FeedDemon, I immediately ran into an ugly problem: a huge number of RSS feeds are invalid. This made it impossible to use an off-the-shelf validating XML parser, since it would choke on so many existing feeds. A number of very popular RSS feeds are shockingly invalid, and I couldn't expect FeedDemon to compete in the RSS aggregator market if it couldn't handle them. So, I coded my own XML parser, and made it extremely forgiving of problematic feeds.

Atom, however, is a new format, and there's a chance we can get it right. Rather than wasting our time working around validation issues, aggregator authors such as myself can spend our time coding the features our users really want.

I agree. There are a pile of RSS debates between W(h)iner and everybody else, and, really, this is our one chance as a community to get the format right from the beginning, and not force readers to have to work around bad feeds.

Just as an aside, here's my Atom feed. It's the default MovableType Atom feed (I think), so it may not be valid, but the folks at SixApart are usually pretty good about keeping their stuff valid.

Posted by Jake on 01/19/04 @ 04:41 PM
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People Considered Harmful from Pudding Time! on 02/12/04 @ 05:07 PM:
Ed's over on his blog coping with a reaction to escaped markup in XML documents which is, evidently, bad. That, in turn, puts me (Read More)

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