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Re: Postel's law, exceptions

• To: James Robertson <jarober@g...>
• Subject: Re: Postel's law, exceptions
• From: Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@m...>
• Date: Thu, 15 Jan 2004 12:20:00 -0500
• Cc: xml-dev@l...
• In-reply-to: <5.1.0.14.2.20040115101443.03f5f5e0@w...>
• References: <p06010205bc2c4d3b7399@[192.168.254.4]><830178CE7378FC40BC6F1DDADCFDD1D10190E1B6@R...> <CBA00C77-4638-11D8-8ADE-000A95CCC59E@x...><864E88FE-4651-11D8-8ADE-000A95CCC59E@x...><p06010205bc2c4d3b7399@[192.168.254.4]><5.1.0.14.2.20040115101443.03f5f5e0@w...>

At 10:19 AM -0500 1/15/04, James Robertson wrote:

>There's a practical problem with this idea - most aggregators 
>already deal with RSS, and have started adding support for the early 
>Atom formats.  As an aggregator author, I can tell you that using a 
>separate framework for dealing with Atom is not a likely scenario; 
>I'm using the same code to deal with Atom that I use to deal with 
>RSS.  As such, it has leniency for things (like illegal characters) 
>for both RSS and Atom.  I suspect that other aggregator authors 
>either are or will be in the same boat; asking people to maintain 
>different sets of rules for the two formats will seem odd to end 
>users, and require some level of extra work on the part of authors. 
>This is a 'facts on the ground' problem - what do you suggest as a 
>solution?
>

I suggest using one of the many high quality, open source XML parsers 
to process Atom feeds. (Hell, I suggest doing it for RSS.) This is 
minimal extra work on your part. Take the data produced by the XML 
parser and feed that into the part of your processing chain that 
handles the structures rather than using your custom built RSS 
parser. If your process does not cleanly separate the parsing from 
the data strcuture building, then you may need to add an additional 
step where the parse results are morphed into the same internal data 
structure you use.

The only reason aggregator authors needed to write custom RSS parsers 
in the first place was because they were trying to parse non-XML 
documents. If Atom feeds are XML, then use an XML parser.
-- 

   Elliotte Rusty Harold
   elharo@m...
   Effective XML (Addison-Wesley, 2003)
   http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/effectivexml
   http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0321150406/ref%3Dnosim/cafeaulaitA

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