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The RSS Profile is a really helpful document that helps developers use best practices and avoid typical pitfalls when handling or producing RSS feeds.
That said, why isn’t the RSS Advisory Board - the very people who created the profile - following the profile recommendations in their own feeds?
The Feed Validator now produces warnings according to the profile, but this table shows nearly all of the individuals on the board aren’t following their own advice.
To date, these board members have valid RSS 2.0 feeds that don’t conform to the profile: Eric Lunt, Jake Savin, Jenny Levine, Brent Simmons. Matthew Bookspan and Randy Charles Morin don’t even have valid RSS 2.0 feeds at the time of this writing.
One might reasonably argue that the members shouldn’t put the profile into practice until it is ratified. That wouldn’t be a bad thing, but it is a lost opportunity to show that the profile is easy to follow. Besides, the profile was ratified a week ago. Time to eat your own dog food, guys.
Full disclosure: TechBrew’s RSS feed doesn’t meet all the recommendations of the profile either.
7 responses so far ↓
1 Randy Charles Morin // Oct 23, 2007 at 1:10 pm
I manage approximately 100k feeds. I’m sure they generate lots of errors and warnings. I’d have to hire an army to make sure they always validate. That doesn’t say anything about the profile.
2 Mark Woodman // Oct 23, 2007 at 1:16 pm
Randy, you get a free pass if you’re managing 100K feeds
Too bad you don’t have a common mechanism to ensure QC on all of them, though.
Still, this is an opportunity lost for the Board to show the profile is useful. If they don’t even bother to follow it, why should anybody else?
Perhaps the best evidence is to wait a month or two and see if the adoption rate among board members has improved.
3 Rogers Cadenhead // Oct 23, 2007 at 2:13 pm
Giving good advice is always easier than following it. You do have a good point, and I will pester the board members to practice what we preach.
In some cases, we’re already fixing this by working with the creators of the publishing software they use.
4 Randy Charles Morin // Oct 23, 2007 at 4:02 pm
BTW, the reason my feed doesn’t validate is a bug in FeedBurner.
5 James Holderness // Oct 24, 2007 at 5:30 am
As has been mentioned, the software used to produce the feed isn’t always under the control of the blog author. Just because the tools developers aren’t yet following the recommendations, doesn’t mean they’re bad recommendations.
As for waiting a month or two, the Atom syndication format, by comparison, has been an official RFC since December 2005. And yet the co-chair of the Atom WG still has invalid feeds over a year and half later: http://tinyurl.com/2k3uuk
Those bugs have been around so long that I’ve long since shipped updated software with patches to work around the problem rather than wait for the feed to be fixed.
Based on the above evidence, would you make a similar assertion that the Atom syndication format isn’t useful or easy to follow?
6 Mark Woodman // Oct 24, 2007 at 7:16 am
James,
I recognize that all sorts of nerves have been touched on this topic on the public forum, but if you’ll carefully read this post, you’ll find neither criticism of RSS nor of the profile.
There is no “assertion that [RSS] isn’t useful or easy to follow” whatsoever.
The scope of my assertion is that this “is a lost opportunity to show that the profile is easy to follow.”
7 Rogers Cadenhead // Oct 26, 2007 at 10:17 am
To follow up, WordPress and WordPress MU have added support for atom:link:
http://www.rssboard.org/news/179
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