Article:		Parsing RSS At All Costs
Subject:		Breaking Industry Standards A Competitive Advantage?
Date:		2003-01-23 10:08:12
From:		Dare Obasanjo
Response to: End-user perspective
I've heard your arguments before from other people and don't agree with them. Thankfully, those of us who work on core XML technologies at Microsoft don't have this attitude towards XML and related standards simply because we want to gain "competitive advantage". If we did many of the gains that XML brings to the our users due to its reusability and ability to foster interoperability would be lost. Your article highlights a mini tragedy of the commons. If XML applications that process RSS documents begin to lean towards processing ill-formed XML then when RSS files are reused such as many XML formats are wont to be (e.g. some mention using RSS for weblog archives, others have suggested using it as a general push technology) then this sloppiness and lack of standards adherence will creep into this avenues as well. All in all it's interesting to read a column called Dive Into XML on a website called XML.com which encourages poisoning the XML in the name of "competitive advantage".

Previous Message

Up

Next Message

• Robustness Principle
  2003-01-23 10:40:11 Mark Pilgrim [Reply]
  
  This has nothing to do with the tragedy of the commons (boy, there's an overused phrase). It has everything to do with the Robustness Principle that Postel nailed years ago in RFC 793: "TCP implementations will follow a general principle of robustness: be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others." The same applies here: validators and programs that produce RSS should be as conservative as possible; end user tools that consume RSS should be as liberal as possible. They serve different masters.

  
  I'm tired of arguing with you, Dare. Despite your misrepresentation, we can all see for ourselves that my article clearly demonstrates an actual problem, describes a workaround for consuming tools, and pushes for not one but two long-term social solutions (the centralized advocacy effort at Syndic8, and the decentralized solution of making non-well-formedness visible to the end user).

  
  Meanwhile, it's ironic that you hold up Microsoft as the epitome of XML standards compliance. What short memories we have! Have a quick look back in the XML mailing list archives to see all the confusion their ultra-liberal MSXML parser caused with people who mistook it for an actual validating XML parser. ("Whatdya mean my XML's not well-formed? It looks fine when I open it in IE!") That was not the place to parse at all costs; this is.
  
  

  • You Prove My Point
    2003-01-23 11:11:58 Dare Obasanjo [Reply]
    
    Actually a number of our customers regularly praise the standards compliance of MSXML.

    
    Unfortunately, we also have customers who mistakenly assume that viewing XML in Internet Explorer causes it to be processed by the validating XML parser instead of the well-formed XML parser which is not the case. This design decision was before my time but was most likely motivated by good intentions similar to yours about reducing user pain and ensuring that even invalid but well-formed XML was viewable in the browser. No one thought to think about what would happen downstream when people assumed that

    
    viewable in IE == well-formed & validated XML

    
    instead of just

    
    viewable in IE == well-formed XML

    
    Your attempted slur actually helps bolster my point as to why your article should not be encouraging supposedly "user-friendly" but standards unconformant behavior.
    
    

    • xml dev posts?
      2003-01-24 03:35:19 bryan rasmussen [Reply]
      
      This reminds me of a post on xml-dev where some guy named Tim Bray talked about using MSXML to prove to people that their xml was not well-formed, it was an off-hand remark, but he said something along the lines of that people usually grasped that xml was not well-formed when he had them open it in IE and it told them there was a problem.

      
      Of course I don't know if this Tim Bray character might be someone to listen to. probably not, but still, just saying.