Value of specs
Dave Winer: Now, while we totally appreciate Computerworld
doing RSS feeds, they
don't validate. And of course, most popular
aggregators don't care, today. Ouch. The more
people who don't follow a specification, the less value there is in
that specification.
AFAIK there was no real original RSS "spec", per se. Dave and crew got someone to write up a DTD on their own time. Funny, when designing something like RSS, I would have released a detailed DTD immediately. The words "specs" and "Userland" do not generally go in the same sentence.
Posted by Tony at
<i>And of course, most popular aggregators don't care, today.</i> I see this as analogous to browsers accepting almost any old garbage as HTML. When a browser parses the HTML it knows that there are errors but ignores them. It is because of this that 99% of pages that haven't explicitly been through a validator are broken in some way.
In the same way, aggregators know when a feed is bad but don't complain. If the aggregators marked the bad feeds with an un-smiley face which linked to a validation service then the people who made the bad feeds might be shamed into fixing them as everyone in the communinity can see that it is broken.
Posted by Stuart Woodward at
Is Dave Winer also concerned with how Radio Userland does not spit out valid HTML, or how his own weblog <a href="http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.scripting.com%2F&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline">does not pass W3C validation</a>? It seems a little hypocritical to me.
As long as there are people who will refuse to adhere to specifications like HTML or RSS, there will be aggregators who don't care ... not because they are sloppy but because, if they cared, people would not use them. Would IE be such a popular product if it only displayed <em>valid</em> HTML pages?
Posted by ian at