Jonathan Schwartz: to get the latest updates directly from Sun, be sure to subscribe to our RSS feeds.
You know, people use the term RSS like Kleenex. As long as Sun isn’t using RSS 2.0 to disclose financial results, it will probably be OK. Let’s take a look
Jonathan Schwartz: to get the latest updates directly from Sun, be sure to subscribe to our RSS feeds.
You know, people use the term RSS like Kleenex. As long as Sun isn’t using RSS 2.0 to disclose financial results, it will probably be OK. Let’s take a look at the first feed.
Oops.
Oh, well, it probably is still OK. If RSS 2.0 is used correctly, and Sun is a technology company after all, it will probably be OK. Probably. Let’s take a closer look at that first feed.
This feed does not validate. Eek!
http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/investor/
(13 occurrences) [help]
<guid>http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/investor/</guid>
OK, so in English, what’s the problem here? Well items are intended to be identified by globally unique identifiers. Reusing identifiers is therefore probably not a good idea. Particularly for items as disparate as “Sun’s Q4FY07 Quarterly Results Release” and “Bear Stearns Technology/Internet Conference”. This could be considered cloaking, where information is sent, but in a way where it is likely to be immediately overlaid or ignored. That’s only good if what you are looking for is plausible deniability. It is not good if you are trying to convince the SEC that syndication is a reliable mechanism for distributing financial results.
This error occurs thirteen times.
Tue, 12 Jun 2007 ::00
(2 occurrences) [help]
<pubDate>Tue, 12 Jun 2007 ::00 </pubDate>
Here it looks like the source has a date but no time. The output is a little screwy, and some consumers may not parse this item correctly. While this should have been caught by quality control, it looks like a run of the mill bug.
This error occurs twice.
Wed
(6 occurrences) [help]
<pubDate>Wed, 26 Oct 2006 01:00:00 PST</pubDate>
Believe it or not, this one concerns me the most. Which is meant by this? Thursday, 26 October 2006, or Wednesday, 26 October 2005? Would you trust financial results from a source that can’t get this right?
This error occurs six times.
Update: This comment from James Snell deserves highlighting: I would prefer and expect that a syndication feed discussing something as important as financial results would, at the very least, be digitally signed.
Jonathan’s primary blog feed ([link] - Atom by the way)
The investor relations site promotes a different feed for Jonathan’s blog. Providing multiple feeds with the same content is not considered a best practice by many. Including Microsoft.
In a positive sign, by the time I read this post (after greader picked it up from planet tingly which picked it up from your feed), the feed validates.
Proceeding down the list, we come to this feed which, in addition to producing three warnings, and having enough blank lines to throw off both IE and Firefox’s feed sniffing logic, declares itself as rss version="2"
.
after greader picked it up from planet tingly
You should totally rename it “Planet Tingly.”
intertwingly, it’s just so hard to spell really.
(Obviously, I’m a fan of short domains.)