At 9:07 AM +0100 7/18/03, David(_dot_)Pawson(_at_)rnib(_dot_)org(_dot_)uk wrote:
Has anyone (else) written a stylesheet which processes the common
rss feed formats?
http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2003/04/09/xquery.html
shows a query processing method, not very robust;
There are two big problems with using XSL (or any other XML tool) to
process RSS:
1. Many RSS feeds are malformed. To make matters worse many RSS tools
do not follow the XML spec, and allow malformed RSS rather than
dropping it on the floor. This encourages the promulgation of more
malformed RSS.
2. RSS documents often contain escaped markup hidden inside CDATA sections.
Both of these are severe violations of the letter and spirit of the
XML spec. They make it effectively impossible to handle RSS with XML
tools. For these reasons, I used RSS as an example of not to design
an XML application in Effective XML.
The next version of RSS *may* perhaps fix these problems. However,
right now there seem to be a lot of developers who prefer to work
with ugly, broken, non-XML than to make the minimal effort to
generate well-formed XML that uses markup as markup and text as text.
They are being penny-wise and pound-foolish. I am not optimistic
about the future of RSS as a result.
--
Elliotte Rusty Harold
elharo(_at_)metalab(_dot_)unc(_dot_)edu
Processing XML with Java (Addison-Wesley, 2002)
http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xmljava
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0201771861/cafeaulaitA
XSL-List info and archive: http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list