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Originally Posted by hacker
I've personally run into dozens of feeds that are exported from very popular websites, that don't even validate as a proper feed. Techncially, as developers (or those who are parsing feed content with tools we write), we're supposed to reject the feed as invalid; the XML specification requires it, but the users don't care, they just want the content. Herein lies the complexity... and the paradox. |
Use a fault-tolerant parser to process the feeds. Usually, feed parsing issues are due to relatively harmless errors such unknown entity names caused by copying HTML directly to the feed. An RSS parser should be able to process ill-formed content, just like browsers have to deal with all sorts of HTML soup.
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Originally Posted by hacker
I haven't yet found a single useful feed that provides the followed content in a consistent mobile format (except ours, of course). They all just link to an overly-heavy, banner-ad-ridden, full-size webpage. These aren't fun to read on a PDA. |
Use link rewriting to make the links point to PDA-friendly "printable" versions of pages. Both Sunrise and JPluck have supported this for a long time already. This way you can make PDA-friendly versions of many sites that don't have a dedicated "mobile" version.
Newsfeeds are especially useful for PDA's because they can cut through the fluff and link directly to articles. Furthermore, they can be presented with a consistent layout, irrespective of the site they originate from.