Article:		Parsing RSS At All Costs
Subject:		Benefits and harms are not evenly distributed
Date:		2003-01-23 08:03:10
From:		bryan rasmussen
Response to: Benefits and harms are not evenly distributed
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.

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• Benefits and harms are not evenly distributed
  2003-01-23 11:40:03 Aaron Swartz [Reply]
  
  You write: "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"

  
  No, it would not. The person who puts out the feed rarely reads it.
  
  

• End-user perspective
  2003-01-23 08:37:02 Mark Pilgrim [Reply]
  
  > "implying that newsreaders will have to parse everything that proclaims itself RSS whether it is or not because of business pressures to do so."

  
  Exactly.

  
  > "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"

  
  No. You are punishing the wrong people. You are still operating under the mistaken impression that XML, in and of itself, is important. It is not. It is a means to an end. End users don't care. And they shouldn't have to care.

  
  Look, I was in this position: I tried several news first-generation aggregators that only used real XML parsers. Feeds would go unreadable for days at a time, and by the time they came back I had missed dozens of articles. I tried to switch to another aggregator that could allow me to follow the sites I wanted to follow, but none satisfied me, so I ended up writing the parse-at-all-costs RSS parser and building a homegrown aggregator around it for my own use.

  
  And I'm *technically inclined*. I *care* about XML. Imagine the reaction of an end user who isn't, and doesn't. They bought (downloaded/whatever) a program that purports to help them read all the news and follow all the sites that they care about. They like this idea. Then they find out that sometimes it doesn't work, sometimes sites that worked yesterday don't work today, and some sites don't work at all, because of something called "XML". They don't know from XML, they've never seen XML, they don't care about XML, but this stupid POS program is complaining and saying there's nothing it can do about this "XML" problem and suggesting, in its infinite wisdom, that the end user should take it upon themselves to work around this problem by sending an email to the site owner and waiting an indeterminate length of time before they can read the news they care about, if ever.

  
  You're kidding, right?

  
  Then the user hears about another aggregator, a direct competitor, which claims to be able to let them follow *all* the sites they care about. It doesn't complain; it doesn't whine; it doesn't suggest that they work around the developer's laziness by firing off emails to random people they've never met. It just works.

  
  Which would *you* choose?