intertwingly

Jonathan Schwartz: to get the latest updates directly from Sun, be sure to subscribe to our RSS feeds.

You know, people use the term RSS like Kleenex.  As long as Sun isn’t using RSS 2.0 to disclose financial results, it will probably be OK.  Let’s take a look at the first feed. 

Oops.

Oh, well, it probably is still OK.  If RSS 2.0 is used correctly, and Sun is a technology company after all, it will probably be OK.  Probably.  Let’s take a closer look at that first feed.

This feed does not validate.  Eek!

• line 50, column 55: guid values must not be duplicated within a feed: http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/investor/ (13 occurrences) [help]

  <guid>http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/investor/</guid>

  OK, so in English, what’s the problem here?  Well items are intended to be identified by globally unique identifiers.  Reusing identifiers is therefore probably not a good idea.  Particularly for items as disparate as “Sun’s Q4FY07 Quarterly Results Release” and “Bear Stearns Technology/Internet Conference”.  This could be considered cloaking, where information is sent, but in a way where it is likely to be immediately overlaid or ignored.  That’s only good if what you are looking for is plausible deniability.  It is not good if you are trying to convince the SEC that syndication is a reliable mechanism for distributing financial results.

  This error occurs thirteen times.

• line 52, column 47: pubDate must be an RFC-822 date-time: Tue, 12 Jun 2007 ::00 (2 occurrences) [help]

  <pubDate>Tue, 12 Jun 2007 ::00 </pubDate>

  Here it looks like the source has a date but no time.  The output is a little screwy, and some consumers may not parse this item correctly.  While this should have been caught by quality control, it looks like a run of the mill bug.

  This error occurs twice.

• line 467, column 54: Incorrect day of week: Wed (6 occurrences) [help]

  <pubDate>Wed, 26 Oct 2006 01:00:00 PST</pubDate>

  Believe it or not, this one concerns me the most.  Which is meant by this?  Thursday, 26 October 2006, or Wednesday, 26 October 2005?  Would you trust financial results from a source that can’t get this right?

  This error occurs six times.

Update: This comment from James Snell deserves highlighting: I would prefer and expect that a syndication feed discussing something as important as financial results would, at the very least, be digitally signed.