Could NetNewsWire use a smiley face?
It looks like Brent Simmons spent most of today writing about strictness in parsing in NetNewsWire. From my rather-out-of-the-loop perspective, pretty much everything he says is right on target.
Some of his comments imply that improving the validity of the various RSS feeds out there is hopeless. While that might be right, Brent and the other newsreader authors could do something that might make a difference here. About five years ago, a small company in Germany introduced a web browser called iCab. It has never quite caught on as much as many people hoped, but it includes one feature that I haven’t seen in any other web browser — a built-in HTML validator. When you browse the Web with iCab, you get a smiley face at the top right of your browser window if the page validates, a cautious face if the page has warnings, and a frowny face if the page has errors. Better yet, you can click on the cautious and frowny faces and find out exactly what’s wrong with the current page.
I’m not sure how a feature like that would fit in to NetNewsWire or any other RSS reader, but it’d certainly be interesting to see someone try it. It might even decrease support queries from users who wonder why a particular feed isn’t displaying correctly.
Michael Tsai Said,
January 13, 2004 @ 8:41 am
Sounds good to me.
John Gruber Said,
January 13, 2004 @ 8:57 pm
Instead of displaying the errors in NNW, it could pass you a URL to the online feed validator. E.g., http://feedvalidator.org/check?url=http://example.com/malformed.rss
NNW already sends you there when you use its Validate This Feed command. This would work for any RSS aggregator.
Mike Zornek Said,
January 13, 2004 @ 9:23 pm
Built-in validators
Eric has a great post that follows Brent (of NetNewsWire fame) and his thoughts on strictness in parsing. Eric brings up the idea that NewNewsWire might want to include a built in RSS validator and show a respective smiley face on its results. Apparent…
Raena Armitage Said,
January 16, 2004 @ 11:59 pm
It’s great that iCab does this, but until it catches up to the rest of the world with current standards support, its validator is more or less pointless.
Harold Said,
January 17, 2004 @ 2:32 am
As an avid iCab user, who uses the error reporting quite a lot, I wholehartedly support this suggestion. A built-in vaidator (whether completely internal or redirecting to an online service) would drastically reduce the amount of bad feeds out there.