Monday
13
Jun 2005

FeedLounge development: feed validation

(8:47 am) Tags: [Software, Why I like..., Projects, FeedLounge]

Welcome to the second of a series of posts on the development. If you missed the first one, check it out here: FeedLounge development: the parser.

The feed validator

We have feeds being parsed, but we also wanted to help make the world a better place by allowing the end user to know whether or not the feed is valid. As Geof rightly points out, we MUST follow Postel’s Law when parsing feeds (”be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others”). Why not give a quick heads-up to someone that might be able to help fix the problem?
So, in FeedLounge, there is a banner near the item content that tells the user the feed is invalid. The user is given a link to click on to see for themselves what is wrong with the feed, using the service from feedvalidator.org.

Hopefully someone will come along that knows the person publishing the feed, and helps nudge them to fix the problem, to make the world a better place for all feed reading entities. If this banner gets too annoying, it can be hidden down to a small icon, and the user can go on with her feed reading. And of course this setting is persistent, so the user does not continue to be annoyed.

Quick Note to Sam and Mark: First, thank you from the entire FeedLounge team for the excellent code that is feedvalidator. Second, I hope you will yell at us if we are not using feedvalidator.org according to your Terms of Service, we believe that we are, as it takes the end user clicking on the link to activate feedvalidator.org, all of our backend validation is done on our own server.

Interesting stats around validation

Of all the feeds that FeedLounge is currently parsing, validating, and tracking, 34.5% have some issue, 22.5% are NOT valid, and 17.8% are completly broken (404, 304, no response at all, etc). That’s 1/5 to 1/3 of all feeds that FeedLounge might not allow the users to read if we were using a strict feed parser!
As a side note, a large portion of the invalid feeds so far are from some version of WordPress. There are a lot of users out there that haven’t felt that upgrading is important. Please upgrade!!! The security fixes alone are worth it. I hope in a future release that the WordPress team might use one common codebase for feed creation, rather than separate code for each feed format. Disclaimer: dotnot.org uses WordPress 1.5.1.2, and will not change to something else anytime soon. I like WordPress, just offering constructive criticism, and I just want to give the WP team a friendly nudge from time to time :)

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