It’s just data
Edward O’Connor: Hixie’s not the sort of guy to leave things underspecified, so HTML5 defines (in excruciating detail) how to convert an HTML document to Atom, even when the HTML document in question is, shall we say, less than ideal.
This has spawned a lengthy thread. In that thread, I requested (one, two, three times) that:
I suggest that you actually test out how common feed aggregators react when they are presented with the same feed differing only in the entry ids.
I’m pleased to see Atom as a foundation for a number of emerging standards in quite a number of venues.
Joseph Scott: Today we’ve turned on PuSH support for the more than 10.5 million blogs on WordPress.com. There’s nothing to configure, it’s working right now behind the scenes to help others keep up to date with your posts.
wants.rss do
redirect_to feeds_path(:format => :atom),
:status=>:moved_permanently
end
wants.atom
Pure poetry.
Michael Koziarski: Switch to on-by-default XSS escaping for rails.:
For existing applications, the changes needed will tend to be small and easily spotted. The biggest impact will be to books and tutorials. For new applications, this is all goodness. Edition 4 will be updated to reflect this change.
It is a name I don’t care for, but alas, one that likely will stick. The concept is to provide explicit support in HTML for embedding metadata in content. Both Microformats and RDFa do related things.
As is common in distributed development, things haven’t exactly happened in chronological order.
Background for the upcoming W3C AC meeting in general, and for the panel on the future of browsers in specific: A Few Select Quotes.
PlanetApache now is planet.apache.org/committers. The software has been updated to the latest version of Venus. The template has been updated to the same one that I’ve evolved with Planet Intertwingly
I expect to receive a credible offer from Microsoft in the next two weeks. I in no way initiated the conversation, nor am I an any way unhappy with IBM.
Based on discussions so far, it looks like the offer would be to work for Omri Gazitt, or possibly John Shewchuk. We’ve discussed a number of possible roles, most of them focusing on Open Web activities, either advocating their increased and correct use within Microsoft, and/or engaging in Open Web communities on Microsoft’s behalf.
I would expect to continue working with the ASF, the W3C, and ECMA TC39, though my role may end up changing a bit in the latter two. Relocation is not an option at this time.
Initial Implementing Guidance for the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009: For each of the near term reporting requirements (major communications, formula block grant allocations, weekly reports) agencies are required to provide a feed (preferred: Atom 1.0, acceptable: RSS) of the information so that content can be delivered via subscription. [via Aaron Swartz]
Here’s hoping that each agency provides a permanent, universally unique identifier for each and every entry and feed.
Valid, with warnings. Notably:
Content-Type: text/xml - technically illegal. Content contains a “curly” apostrophe properly encoded as utf-8. Does not tend to cause a problem in practice.
Two entries with the same id - technically legal, but in practice an egregious error.
In related news, http://www.whitehouse.gov/ is well-formed XHTML 1.0 Transitional, served as... you guessed it... text/html. This time with charset=utf-8. Again, nothing that causes any problems in practice.
The WHATWG has a FAQ. In a number of places what is written there does not reflect my thinking on this matter. Perhaps it doesn't reflect the opinion of others in the group? As this wiki is not operating under the burden of rules like [citation needed] it is difficult to determine exactly whose opinion this page does reflect.
Here are some thoughts on the points made there.
Dare Obasanjo: We have a similar problem when importing arbitrary RSS/Atom feeds onto a user’s profile in Windows Live ... What I like about the first draft of Atom media extensions is that it is focused on the basic case of syndicating audio, video and image for use in activity streams ... The interesting question is how to get the photo sites out there to adopt consistent standards in this space?
If I may be so bold as to make a humble suggestion: implement them. Demonstrate the value. If WindowsLive, YouTube, and FriendFeed could join in on the discussion, this would be a slam dunk. Others would quickly follow.
Jon Udell: If we recapitulate the RSS/Atom experience with ICS, and lots more ad-hoc ICS feeds arrive on the scene, charts like this will go even redder. To make them go green, we’ll need a more robust ICS validator.
Jon has done an excellent first step: demonstrating that there is a problem.
The next step is harder.
Stopped by the local mall. Stood in line for five minutes tops. Gave my name and address, was handed a form by a person who witnessed me signing it, then she signed it herself, and I then took the signed form to a second stop where I swapped the form for my ballot. I then took the ballot to a counter with partitions where I filled in my choices. Finally I took the completed ballot to where it was scanned and counted. I was handed a sticker and thanked.
Jacques Distler: I got quite annoyed that the existing software (Venus) was unable to handle my own Atom feed. Apparently, the Universal Feedparser is weak, and easily confused by posts like this one.
Inside the feedparser is the following comment, originally by Mark Pilgrim:
# This will horribly munge inline content with non-empty qnames, # but nobody actually does that, so I'm not fixing it.
The bad news is that continued further progress is difficult. The internal model for the feed parser for content is a serialized string. Such a string is repeatedly pulled apart using a SGML parser and put back together. It was the best technology at the time. Workable, but not ideal for HTML. Problematic for XHTML.
That’s what inspired me to produce Mars.
Is this feed valid? At the moment, the feedvalidator only issues a warning on the use of a text/plain mime type. At the time the feedvalidator was originally written, this was only a venial sin, primarily because browsers had no material feed support at the time, and because both desktop and web server based aggregators largely ignored the content type.
Times have changed a bit.
Eric Lawrence: we’ve provided web-applications with the ability to opt-out of MIME-sniffing. Sending the new authoritative=true attribute on the Content-Type HTTP response header prevents Internet Explorer from MIME-sniffing a response away from the declared content-type
While I’m not a fan of content-sniffing, one of my few pet peeves with HTML5 is that it endeavors to institutionalize the practice with no provisions for content providers to opt out. As the lesser of the available evils, I hope Microsoft’s proposal is quickly adopted by other browsers.
Nelson Minar starts a meme. Rafe Colburn waters it down. I’ve watered it down even further.
Whatever you call your feed, Safari will call it RSS. Don’t sweat the small stuff.
Which format should you pick? I’d suggest that you pick whichever one that you can consistently produce with the fewest errors and warnings detected by the feedvalidator. Test with Iñtërnâtiônàlizætiøn and ampersands in titles. June, particularly in the UK is also a good time to test.
Dominic Jones: In a move that portends dramatic changes in how disclosures are disseminated online, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has added news feeds for every issuer and reporting person who files with the commission’s EDGAR database [via Charles Hoffman]
It would be nice if somebody could introduce the SEC to the validator.