RE: [xsl] rss, in all its guises

[David.Pawson@xxxxxxxxxxx]

> From: Elliotte Rusty Harold 
> Sent: 20 July 2003 23:32

> There are two big problems with using XSL (or any other XML tool) to 
> process RSS:
> 
> 1. Many RSS feeds are malformed. To make matters worse many RSS tools 
> do not follow the XML spec, and allow malformed RSS rather than 
> dropping it on the floor.

I dropped to a two stage.
  1. Java to read, check for well-formed only and save to disk
That kills non well-formed content.

So far I've had to introduce two moded processes for specific feeds
that I wanted, to overcome 'bad' rss.


> 2. RSS documents often contain escaped markup hidden inside 
> CDATA sections.

Grrr :-)
  Not in CDATA sections either. See Tim Brays blog.

> 
> Both of these are severe violations of the letter and spirit of the 
> XML spec.
Which makes necho interesting, especially using relaxng.


 They make it effectively impossible to handle RSS with XML 
> tools. For these reasons, I used RSS as an example of not to design 
> an XML application in Effective XML.

Pity the content is so interesting though. Makes processing 'fun' ?


> 
> The next version of RSS *may* perhaps fix these problems.

Why do I feel you'd write the same thing in 12 months time?
2.0 isn't much better in terms of implementation is it.


 However, 
> right now there seem to be a lot of developers who prefer to work 
> with ugly, broken, non-XML than to make the minimal effort to 
> generate well-formed XML that uses markup as markup and text as text. 
> They are being penny-wise and pound-foolish.
<grin/> Or just getting what they want and annoying people used to valid
XML?

 I am not optimistic 
> about the future of RSS as a result.

http://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/FrontPage 


regards DaveP.

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