Comments on: Atom feeds and well-formed XML

By: Allyn

Allyn — Tue, 17 May 2005 22:19:47 +0000

I know this isn’t for newsgator support, but figured the post would be relevant.

Has anyone had problems with newsgator 2.0 and google groups feeds?

GG uses atom, but newsgator doesn’t see it as valid. I can’t believe google, of all sites, would have badly formed atom/xml, but who knows…

By: XML and Information Theory

XML and Information Theory — Thu, 15 Jan 2004 12:28:49 +0000

Greg Reinacker stirred up a controversy by announcing that he would update the Atom parser in NewsGator to parse and display badly formed XML. Those who criticize Greg’s decision point to the fact that if parsers reject badly formed…[more]

By: MB

MB — Wed, 14 Jan 2004 07:22:24 +0000

Here’s an idea:

Change your User Agent to indicate that the last time you read the feed, it appeared invalid. (e.g. instead of “NewsGator”, use “NewsGator-FeedCorrectionMode”). That way the feed producers will see the error. The user might never see anything, though you could put the ‘feed corrected’ info in a custom Outlook column so interested users could search on it.

(Based on a comment from Raymond Chen on Robert Scoble’s blog.)

By: Mark

Mark — Wed, 14 Jan 2004 06:06:21 +0000

Danny, your home page is currently invalid XHTML because of... wait for it... XML wellformedness errors.

Luckily for you, you serve it as text/html and my browser is very forgiving, so I was able to read what you had to say. You are free to fix the problem at your own convenience. Imagine how frustrating publishing would be for you if this sort of silly mistake was treated as a critical error.

Apparently XML is more demanding that you thought.

By: Ron Green

Ron Green — Wed, 14 Jan 2004 01:30:31 +0000

The NewsGator customer side of me says, “Thanks Greg”.

The developer side of me says, “If it doesn’t comply, reject it”.

I agree with me.

By: Atom & XML

Atom & XML — Wed, 14 Jan 2004 01:23:45 +0000

Les auteurs respectifs de NetNewsWire et de FeedDemon ont annoncs cette semaine que leur support d’Atom serait XMLement strict. Cela veut dire que les fils Atom devront ncessairement tre valides XML pour tre lu dans ces 2 aggrgateurs et que d…[more]

By: Greg Reinacker

Greg Reinacker — Wed, 14 Jan 2004 00:26:41 +0000

Come on folks, let’s not get bogged down in lawyer-speak in specs. The Atom spec might say something like “if it’s not well-formed XML, it’s not an Atom feed”. Ok, fine…we’ll parse EVERY valid Atom feed.

We’ll also parse a couple of feeds that aren’t Atom, per the spec, but that we can make some sense out of for the benefit of our users.

By: Danny

Danny — Wed, 14 Jan 2004 00:22:43 +0000

If the Atom specification states that you must reject invalid feeds, will you a) not make any claims about supporting Atom, or b) mislead your users?

Patrick, I suspect the specifications for DVD formats are considerably more demanding than producing well-formed XML.

By: Greg Reinacker

Greg Reinacker — Tue, 13 Jan 2004 23:43:58 +0000

To pb, yes - your posts are being deleted. And if one post is deleted, then reposting the same thing will certainly get deleted again.

If you don’t understand why I’m deleting your comments, or you think I should allow them to remain here, feel free to contact me privately about it.

By: pb

pb — Tue, 13 Jan 2004 23:23:23 +0000

I guess my post keeps getting deleted.

[Edited]