Mark Pilgrim and Sam Ruby have announced the launch of a RSS validator service. The service is optimized for the recently proposed RSS 2.0 format, but supports prior versions. This is some excellent work! I particularly appreciate the friendly and instructive error messages is generates. This validator will be quite helpful and instructive to those who do not understand (or simply don't have the patience for) the mostly vague and loosely worded documentation. Being valid RSS does not guarantee that a feed's content is well-formed enough to be useful to an end user.
In other related, while the flaming on RSS has subsided for the time being, active discussion continues. Joel Spolsky raised the issue of RSS bandwidth consumption. The persistent downloading of his feed by aggregators using a brute force GET is costing him in bandwidth overruns. Mark suffers from the same issues and summarizes the conversation thus far here. Sam proposes a bandwidth friendlier solution here. I've noticed that my syndication feed hits also outweigh my web pages -- however I'm not the rock star that Mark and Joel are so I haven't had to pay extra. Yet. I know blagg that I use as the basis for my own homegrown aggregator is one of those pigs. Implementing DJ Adams' ETag-enabled wget script with blagg should help.
Ben Hammersley points out Ian Davis' LiSA "a SAX-like API for processing syndication formats. It's intention is to abstract away all the fluff contained in the current raft of syndication formats into a set of event notifications such as startDocument, startChannel, startItem, endItem etc."
I haven't been writing as much because I've been heads down coding the next version of the mt-rssfeed plugin and the underlying liberal parser. The liberal parser will be fully namespace-aware -- or at least as I understand it. The plugin has been completely rewritten and has too many new features and enhancements to list here. I should be starting my own internal testing today with a public beta test in the coming week.
