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On Fri, Jun 10, 2005 at 02:14:05AM +1000, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> <quote who="[EMAIL PROTECTED]">
>
> > <?xml version="1.0"?><rss version="2.0">
>
> Keep in mind that all forms of RSS are absolute abominations, most feeds are
> completely broken, and it has not encouraged anyone to use XML properly.
RSS is an example of people trying to make XML work for a real-world
application. No doubt someone read the XML hype and figured that it would
be good for the purpose of data transfer.
> XML is
> quite good in general. RSS and all its related muck (as well as HTML if
> we're being honest) gives it a bad name, given that most people experience
> XML through one of these formats first.
But HTML has been amazingly successful in the "real world" where imperfection
is a way of life. Generally speaking, if you send a browser bad HTML you still
get some sort of rendered output... usually not too far from what you expected.
It seems to me that XML is only useful when the same programmer has control
over the sender and the receiver. For example when a program saves to XML then
loads from XML again (such as gnumeric). This doesn't constitute data transfer,
it is really just a library that makes it easier to save and load
structured data.
> Look at Mark Pilgrim's feedparser (used in Planet) to see just how stupid it
> all is.
But what XML people call "broken" is more accurately described as "normal",
the whole idea of a markup language is to be flexible and to have ways to
cope with minor incompatibility between sender and receiver.
- Tel ( http://bespoke.homelinux.net/ )
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