« Feb 2006 Update | Main | Matisyahu »
March 07, 2006
Standard Standards
I'm working on a couple of web systems right now in which I need to work with a number of different standards. The problem is each standard is its own standard. There's no standard standard!
I'm talking specifically about syndication. RSS 0.9x, RSS 1.x, RSS 2.x, Atom 0.x are each, in their own right, a standard. But they are standard much in the way HTML was back in the day. Half of the tags were optional or were "legally" used in several different ways. For example, in olde HTML, you didn't need to close your block level elements. A <p> tag was just as happy without its partner </p> as it was with it. Of course with newer HTML (ahem) standards, the reins are tightening a bit, but the same lawlessness applies to the syndication formats.
So how come there are so many standards for syndication formats? I blame the internet. With the net, anyone (me for example) can publish a method of doing something we'll call Verbing and gather a small following. Someone else can just as easily publish a so-called better way of Verbing (in their opinion) and gain their own following. If this verbing gains large exposure and usage, my Verbing becomes one standard and the other another. Then, when a third party wants to support Verbing, they're forced to, for any real usability to their application, support all the different ways of Verbing. To bring this back around, a decent RSS reader needs to support all the different syndication formats, each with their own optional and required components.
As a user, I find this flexibility great! I just want to read my syndicated news. I don't care what format it's in.
As a programmer parsing syndicated news, I hate it! Am I supporting version x.x correctly? Do x.a and x.b and y.c interfere with each other or have conflicting elements? What happens with x.a isn't truly valid because the provider forgot to put something in? Do I punish the end user? Not if I want to provide a good product. How long do I have to support z.a until not many people use it any more? What is that magic cut-off number?
Programatically dealing with all these different standards is really just a matter of knowing about them and accounting for all their possibilities. But it shouldn't take 1,000 rules to handle as many odd cases and standards for 100,000 feeds.
Now, back to fighting with my parsing. :P
Posted at March 7, 2006 03:59 PM | Rants and Opinions
Comments
Post a comment
Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)
(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)