intertwingly

Sam Ruby: People who propose extensions should try to validate them first. [link] Randy: Wow, it’s amazing how many errors Sam found. Had they tossed that document at Sam, Danny or...

The format doesn’t seem evil, just surprisingly sloppily defined....

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Sam, I pinged them about the invalid RSS 1.0 issue, they did respond (asking for a ref to the relevant spec - I was tempted to suggest they Google...).

Step 3.5: validate. As of this weekend, the feedvalidator understands and will validate elements in the Google base namespace....

Sam,

The documentation for the g:label element/attribute is incorrect, at least for Atom 0.3 bulk uploads to Reference Articles. The sample doc shows multiple g:lable elements, however you must use a single g:label element with comma-separated tags.

Also, the docs say HTML isn’t allowed in the description attribute value. It’s allowed but isn’t rendered. Thus I’ve stripped the HTML from Blogger Atom.xml files for uploading.

The maximum length of a description attribute value is 10,000 (not 1,000) characters. Overlength content elements won’t post.

More details are at [link]

Thanks for the detailed feedback Sam,
it will be great to have the Feed Validator for Googlebase feeds!
I’ll make sure we answer the points you’re making in a reasonable time.

Robert Kebertnet Cooper from ROME also had many similar comments when trying to implement a ROME module for GoogleBase.

P@

Sam Ruby is doing a thorough review of the Googlebase data formats and he isn’t happy about their feeds: None of the complex types are valid RDF/XML, and therefore can’t be used in RSS 1.0 --also personals and news are incomplete. None of the guids...

it will be great to have the Feed Validator for Googlebase feeds!

Everything is pretty much online by this point.  Take a look at these testcases (mostly from the spec itself, some slightly modified to be well-formed, etc).

I’ll make sure we answer the points you’re making in a reasonable time.

More importantly, feel free to critique and/or contribute to the test suite, documentation, or code.  The goal is to catch as many common errors as possible, and provide as helpful guidance as possible when such errors occur.

Danny: Send them here.

Having previously ganked Matt’s Asides for MT, I’ve now just dropped in the original, but I haven’t figured out how to have the front page show ten posts or sections of Shorts, rather than just ten Shorts when I drop in a bunch,...

Google Base的Bulk Uploads功能就是对添加用户在Gbase上发布项的批处理。把多个项的内容用XML格式(RSS1, RSS2和Atom)定义后直接上传，减少在页面上手动多次编辑的麻烦。 Google定义了在Atom上的Google Base的扩展（有点遗憾的是用了已经过时的Atom 0.3格式，Atom1.0已经出来了啊）。 Upload的方式目前有两种，一是上传Atom文件，二是FTP上传（适合大文件）。似乎有做个桌面发布和同步的应用的可能，有人开始做了么？...

feel free to critique and/or contribute to the test suite, documentation, or code.  The goal is to catch as many common errors as possible, and provide as helpful guidance as possible when such errors occur.

Excellent, thanks for the testcases! I will review/contribute. I’ll send Robert your way so that he uses them as well for our ROME Googlebase module unit tests:-)

Mark - lol!

I went through last week and did a Googe Base plug in for ROME. Here if you are interested.

I have to say, there is a lot of stuff in the spec that made me want to scream. Sam also doesn’t mention Google violating their own 5 token comma delimited rules for “location” in their example, but looking at the Google Base production data, it doesn’t seem they enforce that with their software either.

All in all, I have to aggree with, “The format doesn’t seem evil, just surprisingly sloppily defined....” There are scads in inconsistencies between the tag summary page, the tag to tag doc and the schema file, which made implementing a screaming nightmare. There are some good things there, but it really seems like they rushed the documentation out the door.

Sam also doesn’t mention Google violating their own 5 token comma delimited rules for “location” in their example

I thought I did.  Did I miss something?

DOH! Sorry. Must have missed it.

Actually, here is a question about the feed validator I don’t see in your test cases:

The schema file lists several tags that aren’t covered in the doc or the examples from Google. You can see the specifics here.

Are you checking those in your validation?

Actually, while I am whining, has anyone got a reason why “price” everywhere is “floatUnit” and yet there is a specific “currency” enumeration at the item level?

I pointed them at the RSS 1.0 & RDF specs and suggested one way they could fix things (I think the main bit was @rdf:datatype rather than @type), just heard back:

...
We will work to implement your suggestions in to our RSS 1.0 specs.
...

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Hi Sam,
I’m looking at ways to follow the RSS 1.0 spec for Googlebase without making a full RDF schema for our datatypes (as I understand Danny’s suggestion). I thought using  rdf:parseType="Literal" would solve the problem (telling the RDF parser: this is xml, if you’re a pure RDF parser forget it).

I did not see anything in the RSS 1.0 spec that would make this non compliant. Moreover the content module seems to allow using rdf:parseType="Literal"

Why does [link] not validate?
It is true that parseType is not defined in the RDF Schema, but it is defined in the RDF spec and this doc validates at the W3C RDF validator (which seems to imply for me that [link] should be amended (your parser seems to rely on it).

Also how is validator.org related to validator.w3c.org?
Are they just running an older version of your soft, or is it something different and less well maintained?
[link]

telling the RDF parser: this is xml, if you’re a pure RDF parser forget it

Putting this data in as a (relatively) opaque blob probably reduces the usefulness of this to RDF consumers, but you are right, nothing in the spec disallows this, so I’ve committed a change to the feed validator to allow it.

I’ve seen this arrangement before.

Also how is validator.org related to validator.w3c.org? Are they just running an older version of your soft, or is it something different and less well maintained?

At the moment, it is just a (slightly) older version of FeedValidator, but there is a commitment to maintain it.

This started out as a Random Thought (RT). background The Feed Validator is organized as a recursive descent parser for various feed formats.  It is implemented in an object oriented fashion, where each element ‘knows’ what the possible chi... [more]

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Step 3.5: validate . As of this weekend , the feedvalidator understands and will validate elements in the Google base namespace....