Article:		Parsing RSS At All Costs
Subject:		Benefits and harms are not evenly distributed
Date:		2003-01-22 21:24:36
From:		Mark Pilgrim
Response to: Agreed. So what's your solution?
re: "The temporary benefit of being able to read ill-formed RSS feeds is outweighed by the harm caused to XML and the Web" The problem is that the benefit is accrued by the software vendor, and is direct and immediate, but the harm is caused to everyone equally, and is long-term and abstract. Direct and immediate wins every time.

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• Benefits and harms are not evenly distributed
  2003-01-23 08:03:10 bryan rasmussen [Reply]
  
  Direct and immediate wins everytime reminds me of Hardin's arguments vis-a-vis the commons, since come under some controversy.
  It is in the main a philosophical argument, but as such I can not see how it is a sensible one.

  
  You say the direct and immediate wins everytime, implying that newsreaders will have to parse everything that proclaims itself RSS whether it is or not because of business pressures to do so. But if a public newsreader did not parse the RSS instead returning a broken message to the clients of said feed then would this not create direct and immediate pressures on feed authors and sites to produce valid xml, and would this not spur product sales for RSS producers that produced valid RSS?

  
  Part of the reason for xml (which after all is a simpler set of rules than most other languages) that is not well-formed with RSS is of course that RSS (2.0 and pre 1.0) allows escaped html inside of the description element, a practice I believe much more likely to cause broken feeds. As I've harped on before this hampers the transportability of feeds across media, to for example a non-html email newsletter format, various phone media, or even specific browsers.

  
  It seems to me that a vendor that produced both a RSS producer and consumer that could be relied on to produce only well-formed feeds could derive direct and immediate benefits against other vendors, because of reuse of xml in other media.