Why the compromise?
So—why the compromise position? Taken together, these reasons added up.

1. Most users don’t care about this issue; they want to read the news.

The reason NetNewsWire is forgiving with RSS feeds is because other aggregators that came before NetNewsWire were too. Did I get bug reports like “I can’t read this feed in NetNewsWire, but I can read it in x?” Yes.

2. There’s the prisoners dilemma.

Given that only one other aggregator developer was willing to require well-formed-ness for Atom, I was going to get bug reports for Atom feeds. “It works in x, but not in NetNewsWire, it must be NetNewsWire’s bug, right?”

I don’t have time to spend on bug reports for bugs that aren’t even my bugs.

3. There’s an issue of perceived bias.

The reason I wrote my own weblog software was so that people wouldn’t suspect that my software is designed to work best with system x. There’s a similar issue here: I’m on the RSS Board, and yet I don’t want people to think NetNewsWire is designed to work against Atom.

There are some ironies here, of course—one of them being that I believed that my initial choice was the best thing for Atom. (One person jokingly suggested I be removed from the RSS board for being too good to Atom.)

In fact, I still believe my initial choice was the best thing for Atom.

But my job is writing software that people like; my job is not to take care of Atom.
08:55 pm #

Compromise on Atom and XML
Tim Bray suggested a setting for how strict a parser should be with a given feed. Eric Albert suggested a smiley face (as in iCab) to distinguish well-formed from non-well-formed feeds.

I’ve gotten lots of email on the topic of Atom and requiring well-formed XML. I’ve read about this topic pretty much everywhere it’s popped up. And I conclude, reluctantly, that a compromise is the best thing.

I encourage Nick Bradbury—and any other aggregator developer who was planning on requiring XML well-formed-ness for Atom feeds—to take a similar position. Nobody should take a bullet over this.

What I plan to do in NetNewsWire is something like the following—though details may change, of course.

1. Have global and per-feed settings for requiring well-formed XML. The default will be no, to not require it. My Atom and RSS parsers will both work around non-well-formed feeds in the same way. (They’ll most likely use the same code.)

2. Have an optional indicator of some kind that displays when a feed isn’t well-formed XML. (Probably not a little frowny face, but who knows.) This feature will also be turned off by default.

3. Make the Validate this Feed command more visible. Right now it’s available only through a contextual menu; it should be easier to find and use.

If you’re a NetNewsWire user, and you don’t care about this issue, it will stay out of your way. You’ll notice an extra pref and a command in the menu bar, but NetNewsWire won’t be complaining about non-well-formed feeds all the time.

You’re not expected to care about this issue, by the way—you want to read the news. That’s totally cool.

And me, I just want to get back to work fixing bugs and adding new features.
07:40 pm #

Earthquake feeds
We had a mini-earthquake (3.6) last night. Today I discover that the U.S. Geological Survey has RSS feeds for earthquakes.
12:52 pm #

Sam Ruby on syndication and XML well-formed-ness
Sam Ruby: Is my weblog well-formed?

(I’d quote a standout line or two from this, but there’s no way to decide—I’d end up quoting the whole thing. So just go read it.)
12:47 pm #

Show Errors and Warnings
A tip for Xcode users...

One of the things about Xcode is that, when a build has errors or warnings, it’s not as obvious as it was in Project Builder.

So what I did was assign a keyboard shortcut—shift-cmd-E—to the command to show errors and warnings. It’s become automatic after doing a build: I hit that shortcut to see what happened.
11:51 am #

Meet Robb Beal
Robb Beal (of Spring fame) is looking for new employment. Here’s his pitch.
11:08 am #