Article:		Parsing RSS At All Costs
Subject:		This Article is Quite Depressing
Date:		2003-01-22 17:45:45
From:		Dare Obasanjo
It is unfortunate to see XML.com running an article that endorses bringing the haphazard world of Tag Soup from HTML into the world of XML. The primary benefits of XML are its widespread, CONSISTENT usage which allows for the availability of several off-the-shelf tools and reduces vendor lockin. Encouraging consumers of XML to support ill-formed XML reduces the power of XML and induces fragmentation. If we arbitrarily pick bits and pieces of a standard to support then we cheapen the technology and reduce it to worthlessness. I'd hate to see XML on the 'web reduced to HTML during the browser wars with people simply checking if "it works well with Mark Pilgrim's program" or creating ill-formed markup simply to satisfy broken tools.

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• This Article is Quite Depressing
  2003-02-24 07:44:51 Frank Wilhoit [Reply]
  
  What we need to face up to is the fact that the MXL community has broken in half without quite realizing it, and the two halves are talking past each other in perfect incomprehension and increasing frustration.

  
  One camp says that XML is about formal syntax, the other that says it is about informal semantics. Both are right, because XML can do both; they are talking about disjoint applications. It is not necessary for one side to "win", but for both sides to realize that XML is a sufficiently protean technology to do things that its originators did not foresee.
  
  
  

• Agreed. So what's your solution?
  2003-01-22 18:36:10 Mark Pilgrim [Reply]
  
  The tone of the article is based on the demonstrated realities of the RSS world, which I agree is depressing. Are you proposing a solution (other than the two I proposed)? Or are you just idly wishing that life was easier for developers?