Re: [xsl] rss, in all its guises

[Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 9:07 AM +0100 7/18/03, David.Pawson@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
> Has anyone (else) written a stylesheet which processes the common
> rss feed formats?
> http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2003/04/09/xquery.html
> shows a query processing method, not very robust;

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. This encourages the promulgation of more 
malformed RSS.

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

Both of these are severe violations of the letter and spirit of the 
XML spec. 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.

The next version of RSS *may* perhaps fix these problems. 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. I am not optimistic 
about the future of RSS as a result.
--

  Elliotte Rusty Harold
  elharo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
  Processing XML with Java (Addison-Wesley, 2002)
  http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xmljava
  http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0201771861/cafeaulaitA

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