Article:		Parsing RSS At All Costs
Subject:		XML must be well formed
Date:		2003-01-30 11:09:20
From:		Victor Lindesay
Sorry Mark, I have to go with Dare on this one. That XML is well formed is a fundamental principle and a contract to which all XML software applications must adhere. An XML document (well formed by definition) is a thing of value, easily manipulated and used. An attempt at an XML document (not well formed) is just text with funny brackets and is well, basically useless. Sure we have all coded without escaping reserved characters in text nodes - it's easy to overlook and that's part of learning about this new technology. But handling reserved chars in XML processing is basic good practice and if you can't do it in 'production' code - then back to school. RSS applications and the unreliability of RSS data are the product of where we are with web services now. These are problems that perhaps licensing and service level aggreements will solve. And anyway, if the client (and client software) is disappointed that a particular RSS is bad, then how do you think the provider of the RSS feels knowing that his data is unusable. The client can always move on to another feed that works. Thanks for your article, Mark. As usual excellently presented and coded!

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• Content monopolies
  2003-01-30 11:39:36 Mark Pilgrim [Reply]
  
  Re: "The client can always move on to another feed that works."

  
  That's just it: they can't. Each publisher has a natural monopoly on their own content. If I want to read The Register in my news aggregator, there's only one legitimate source.