Atomic
The recent controversy about Atom and XML well-formedness has piqued my curiosity about the nascent syndication format, so this evening I installed Rael Dornfest’s Atomfeed plugin for Blosxom, and can now claim to be the owner of a valid Atom feed. If you use an aggregator that can read it, enjoy!
For what it’s worth, although I’m by no means an expert on XML or syndication or anything of the sort, my take on the well-formedness question tends toward sympathy for the XML “hardliners.” There’s little I can say on the subject that hasn’t already been said by people who (unlike me) eat, sleep, and breathe XML, but to me it seems rather silly to recapitulate one of RSS’s biggest liabilities by requiring developers of Atom aggregators to essentially build custom parsers rather than allowing them to rely on standard XML infrastructure.
I’m well aware of Postel’s Law, and I understand its importance to the Internet, but (and I fear I’m going to have to throw in with Dave Winer here) it seems to me that if you really want to “be liberal in what you accept,” XML (a standard with validity requirements at its core) might not be suited to your purposes. Why pretend something is XML when, for all practical purposes (that is, for all purposes where XML is particularly advantageous), it isn’t?
So, there you have it—it’s nothing terribly earth shattering or original, but now my opinion’s on record. Feel free to educate me about why I’m wrong :-)…
(Update: Under a lot of pressure, and wanting to get back to being a software developer instead of a politician, Brent has relented. Meanwhile, David Hyatt, who knows a thing or two about markup parsing, has weighed in on the side of well-formedness.)