[hacker]

Originally Posted by Laurens

Who cares about the spec? As long as the RSS parser processes valid feeds correctly, I don't see a problem with attempting to process ill-formed feeds.

It is exactly this ignorance of the standards, which causes most of the work we have to do to bring content back into compliance, so it can be parsed by proper tools. It is exactly this ignorance of the standards which cause all of the browser hacks, quirks-mode, and other things that complicate web development.

So to answer your question, I care about the spec. But then again, I write proper code that adheres to the spec, not hacks that work around it.

Exactly, which is why your argument doesn't hold.

No. My argument holds, because no post-processing should be required to make an XML document well-formed. Period. If post-processing is required, then the XML document is broken, and should be rejected as not well-formed (invalid). There is no leeway here.

But then again, you don't care about the spec, so do what you want with it, you're inventing your own standards.

That's why I'm working on an "auto-update" mechanism for my commercial product. This feature is, coincidentally, also based on RSS/RDF.

Instead of writing scalable tools, you continue to work around them. Each to his own. While I applaud your efforts, I disagree with them at many levels, but that is what drives us... and our users; choice. My goal is to remove the human process from the processing. Your goal is apparently to increase the human involvement in the process.

Again, you need link rewriting to make feeds useful for PDA's.

That is one approach, I have another. Again, each to his own.

Great discussion..