intertwingly

It’s just data

Dark Side of Postel’s “law”


Simon Fell’s weblog contains the following line:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="Simon Fell > Its just code" href="http://www.pocketsoap.com/weblog/feed.atom">

feedfinder.py, atomautodiscovery.py, and feedparser.py version 4.1 will fail to pick it up.

nightly feedparser.py picks it up, as does html5lib.

Demonstration: code, output.

Of course, many that can find Simon’s feed will fail to parse it.

There is a dark side to Postel’s “law”