[Catalyst] Validating RSS feeds

[Jonathan Rockway]

Thanks for the info.  I was kinda confused about the whole thing. 
Apparently there are 9 formats, all alike, but all incompatible.  I
thought RSS 2.0 would be "the best" since it did everything I wanted it
to, and had the official-sounding name.  (I tried Atom initially, but
ran into limitations with XML::Feed::Atom; namely that I couldn't
specify both links and guids, and that I couldn't put in both content
and a description... or something like that.)

Oh, and your module looks like it's exactly what I need.  Thanks!  It
seems everyone wants to use URLs as unique ids, but URLs change all the
time.  Glad to see that you're using UUIDs.  :)

(BTW, is there a standard way to look up a UUID on someone's site?  I
don't expose this functionality in my software right now, but it's used
internally and could be exposed if useful to others.)

Regards,
Jonathan Rockway


A. Pagaltzis wrote:
> * Jonathan Rockway <jon at jrock.us> [2006-07-31 18:15]:
>   
>> Speaking of which, can anything *generate* RSS 2.0?
>>     
>
> You don’t want to. RSS 2.0 is broken. The worst misfeature is the
> content model, which boils down like this:
>
>     Here's something that might be HTML. Or maybe not. I can’t
>     tell you, and you can’t guess.
>
> There are many other corners where the format is underspecified
> and/or broken. (Markup in titles, enclosure arity, RFC822 dates,
> no way to specify authors other than by disclosing email
> addresses, “funky” feeds, and probably more that I forget.) The
> only reason people don’t run into them much is that everyone is
> using RSS2 for the same very simple use case, ie. weblogs. If you
> try to push RSS2 much harder than that, it breaks.
>
> The better choice is Atom. Every reader supports it at this
> point, and it’s a real IETF standard  (RSS is only a defacto
> standard) with a rigorous spec: RFC 4287. The RFC includes a
> (non-normative) RelaxNG grammar, though it doesn’t express all
> validation constraints. It is certainly better than no starting
> point at all, though. (I’ve pondered writing an extended version
> that embeds Schematron to cover the things that RNG cannot… maybe
> I should.)
>
> And hey, I have an XML::Atom::SimpleFeed module on CPAN that
> makes generation of feeds a very simple task. (Excuse the absence
> of useful tests. It’s a work in progress. What’s there works
> solidly, though.)
>
> Regards,
>