phil ringnalda

A new syndication spec, combining what looks at first glance like some good reasonable ideas with the grace and tact of an elephant. With diarrhea. Fun ensues.

First I thought Mark Pilgrim’s ideas on what was unsafe in RSS were too extreme. Then I looked at what you can actually do. Now I don’t think they are nearly extreme enough. Everything’s unsafe, and I’m going to have to write my own aggregator, probably called Tinfoil Hat, that embeds Notepad for rendering nothing but text/plain.

Bloglines adds a per-user preference that can be over-ridden per-feed, to let you choose whether to display full items, summaries, or just titles. Finally, after years of putting both in my feeds, they’ll really get used the way I wanted.

Forget RSS and Atom, I just want a working cross-browser CDF.

Add the right comment in your generated HTML, and in WinXP SP2 a page that IE loads from the local machine is safely in the Internet zone, not the unsafe Local Machine zone. A nice added measure of safety for some aggregator authors.

How can a program say “that’s valid, but you need to think about whether this is right” in a way that will make you pay attention?

One of the things that Atom gets right (so far, at least) is separating the idea of a summary from the content of the post. Stripping the (X)HTML from the first few characters of a post, and then claiming that it’s XHTML with significant whitespace isn’t how to do it, though.

This hand-crafted excerpt of a longer item brought to you by the magic of separate elements for separate purposes.

The Atom id element’s a good thing, but not if your Movable Type template produces a non-id id.

Just name the bloody thing Pie and get on to other arguments, please.