Article:		Parsing RSS At All Costs
Subject:		Auto-reporting
Date:		2003-01-22 21:07:36
From:		Mark Pilgrim
Response to: Agreed. So what's your solution?
Many feeds have no contact information, so this can not be easily automated. Regardless, I believe efforts are underway to do exactly this (when possible) in the next release of Aggie. Users who care about such things can take the time to contact the content provider. However, this does not negate the fact that, as an end-user product, the #1 responsibility of the software is to the end user. The end user wishes to read news, and has downloaded, installed, and possibly paid for a program to help them read news. If the program refuses to display news for reasons that the end user considers arcane and trivial, the user will find another program that does not throw such technical hissy fits.

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• Do both
  2003-01-22 22:42:19 Chris Adams [Reply]
  
  Why not do both? If the XML validator fails, display an unobtrusive quality indicator like iCab (the smiling face in the throbber changes to a frown for malformed HTML), automatically send some sort of request to a tracking site and fall back to the error-prone all-costs parser.

  
  The tracking site would be extremely valuable if it could track the buggy software instead of just individual sites. Feeding crawler with, say, the weblogs.com feed would probably give a pretty accurate indicator of the relatively quality of the RSS implementations. While the users may not care, the authors might be more motivated about getting unlisted from the hall of shame.