First Impressions
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.
Jonathan’s primary blog feed ([link] - Atom by the way)
The investor relations site promotes a different feed for Jonathan’s blog. Providing multiple feeds with the same content is not considered a best practice by many. Including Microsoft.
Posted by Sam Ruby atYes, that should be corrected too. They’re using a pre-Roller3 URL, they should update that link to point to [link] which is the correct feed and the one promoted via auto-discovery links on Jonathan’s blog.
Posted by Dave Johnson at
Great Idea, A few nits
First off, let me just say that I applaud the intention of what Sun and Jonathan Schwartz are doing here and I would encourage IBM and other companies to follow suit. However, on a purely technical side, there are some problems with their approach....Excerpt from Planet Atom at
In a positive sign, by the time I read this post (after greader picked it up from planet tingly which picked it up from your feed), the feed validates. Too bad it is still rss2.
Posted by dbt at
In a positive sign, by the time I read this post (after greader picked it up from planet tingly which picked it up from your feed), the feed validates.
Proceeding down the list, we come to this feed which, in addition to producing three warnings, and having enough blank lines to throw off both IE and Firefox’s feed sniffing logic, declares itself as rss version="2".
after greader picked it up from planet tingly
You should totally rename it “Planet Tingly.”
Posted by Mark atThe Sun investors events feed now seems to validate just fine [link]. I guess they fixed it. Nice article though, too many badly formed RSS feeds out there!
Posted by David at
PR, Politics of RSS, Unintended Consequences
Continuing on yesterday’s topic of RSS, I am now starting to understand the importance of RSS standards and appreciating the related politics. There appears to be lots of teeth gnashing and back and forth about these topics. Here is where......Excerpt from Flack's Revenge at
intertwingly, it’s just so hard to spell really.
(Obviously, I’m a fan of short domains.)
Posted by dbt atMaps n' Data
The New York Times has a nice article on maps and amateur map makers. The specter of ‘citizen journalist’ was brought in, but that was easy enough to brush aside. One point of disagreement I had with the Times article is that we aren’t becoming...Excerpt from Burningbird at
That’s embarrassing and should be fixed. I just want to point out that the feeds you reference above were not produced by Roller or blogs.sun.com ;-) Jonathan’s primary blog feed ([link] - Atom by the way), passes validation with some warnings due to embedded Flash and Javascript in the content.
Posted by Dave Johnson at