intertwingly

David Glasser: Looks like it might be fixed now?

The “it” in this case is the White House feed.  Before it used the same UUID in each entry.  That would have been valid, but only if the intent was that the blog only contained one entry, and that entry was replaced in place on each new post.  Clearly that is not the intent, so it was invalid.

On Sunday, I deployed a change to the FeedValidator to indicate this error.

Today the feed has been corrected.

Whoa.

Now I doubt that the people who maintain the software that runs the White House blog read this blog.  Perhaps they care about the Feed Validator.  More likely it was just a coincidence.  But in any case, they have gone from something that an Asshole might claim is spec compliant, to being a Moron, and in such a way that isn’t likely to cause anywhere near as much problem as before, and furthermore in a way that escaped notice of the Feed Validator.

Until now.  The UUIDs aren’t sufficiently unique, but more importantly, they aren’t UUIDs.

Apparently, they are in good company, because on page 6 of RFC 5005 in the second example, the feed/entry/@id has the wrong number of characters in the first part, and non-hex digits in the last two parts.

In any case, I’m not certain that messing with the White House in this matter is a good idea.  Should I happen to mysteriously disappear, let’s just say that it has been nice knowing you.