Lend an eyeball to the RSS Validator

Based on some comments on Scripting News, some people are wondering what changed recently with the RSS Validator.

It appears to be related to the duplicate element issue that was described here and quickly fixed.

Mark Pilgrim writes:

... the spec has absolutely nothing to say about the case where a feed contains two elements that mean the same thing. We had been around and around on this issue, and no one could tell us what to do, so we made a judgement call. ... as far as we could tell, we were the only 2 people in the world who gave a shit. I didn't see anyone else even bothering enough to care until a few weeks ago.

Once SSF-DEV set themselves up as the group who cared about this sort of RSS minutia, we immediately deferred to their judgement. Thank God *someone* cares; ... I hope they clarify the rest of the manure that is the RSS spec; the validator will be the first beneficiary of their efforts, I promise you.

This duplicate-element issue sounds like an honest mistake. Pilgrim and Sam Ruby tackled the thankless job of writing a validator for a loosely specified protocol without many volunteer eyeballs, from the looks of the project's mailing list. As one of the only people poking around OPML, I can sympathize.

2003/07/12 · 0 COMMENTS · Link