As you may know, recently the blogging devleopment community has been going wild over RSS and have decided to make a new syndication format.
I thought that this had started because Dave Winer had got upset and declared some people's feeds "funky" but now that I read this definition of "funky" and Don Parks examples of "funky" I can see what he was getting at.
But in the "funky"ness definition Dave says "I never wanted to have to define this". This is the problem. Maybe I missed a crucial post somewhere but I had no idea exactly what this "funky" argument was about. I thought it was due to people using incorrect date formats! If a developer can't understand what the argument is about then who on earth can?
What would have been better would have been if Dave had found a problem he should have taken it to the RSS 2.0 validator crew. and proceeded through there.
I really believe in machine validation for testing. If the machine tells you that your feed is bad then who cares. Maybe Technorati could be brought in to find highlight high traffic sites who have bad feeds. Maybe the popular aggregators should flag bad feeds. It is only through naming and shaming that things will get better but that shouldn't be one person's crusade.
Posted by stuartcw at July 1, 2003 12:56 PM