Monday, July 14, 2003

RSS

I've finally gotten around to producing a RSS feed for this weblog. You can find the feed here.

It took me a while to get around to it because I didn't want to invest a lot of time, yet I hated the idea of producing a crappy feed. What's a crappy feed you ask? While writing Composite I have encountered three kinds:

1. Ones that produce invalid XML. Radio Userland is a stelar example of those.
2. Ones that leave relative URLs in the contained HTML. While this a gray area in the RSS spec, most aggregators can't handle it so doing it is a major faux pas. CityDesk is guilty of this sin.
3. Ones that put the weblog entries in CDATA sections instead of encoding them properly. CityDesk is also guilty of this one. CDATA sections may be fine for hard-coded content known in advance, but they can break based on the user input. All it takes is for the user to enter the three magic characters, and the RSS feed is dead.

Points 1 and 3 are handled easily by using a pre-packaged solution for producing XML such as the .NET Framework's XmlTextWriter class. I was stuck converting relative URLs to absolute ones in a hygienic fashion, but I finaly figured an easy way to do that today. More on that when I get some sleep.

   11:44 PM