There's a bit of a "tussle" going on regarding how strict
applications should be in accepting data from other applications
specifically as it relates to syndication data. Mark Pilgrim writes;
"The primary goal of any software is to please your own
customers. A secondary, and longer-term, goal is to support the
underlying standards that make your software possible.
For news aggregators, that means letting customers read news, then also
doing what you can to increase feed quality. The key to increasing feed
quality, as Sam points out,
is to close the feedback loop, so that when a feed is bad or goes bad,
someone who cares can notify someone who can fix it. Draconian error
handling does not actually accomplish this, unless it is accompanied by
a feedback mechanism that, for example, links to the feed validator
or scrapes the invalid feed for contact information. But then, why not
skip the draconianism and just keep the feedback mechanism? I am
pleased to see that the discussion has now moved away from
draconian-vs-tolerant and on to how best to close the feedback loop."
I'm not sure that I agree with the basis of his
argument that a secondary goal of any software is to support the
underlying standards that make your software possible. In fact, in all
the years that I have been responsible for rolling out applications to
end users, the thought has never crossed my mind. What has always been
important was ensuring that the underlying standards that make my
applications possible continue to evolve in a way that support my
primary goal of pleasing my customers. Customers need to be treated as
beneficiaries of these standards, not victimized by them. This makes me
suspicious of this "feedback loop".
Feed quality is not the responsibility
of the client or server developer, its not the
responsibility of whomever is consuming the feed and its
certainly not the responsibility of any standards effort. Feed
quality lies solely and squarely on the shoulders of content producers.
Those that are concerned with quality will produce quality and their
customers will appreciate them for it. Those that are not
will likely suffer at the hands of varying degrees of strictness
in the various applications that feed consumers employ.
Needless to say, I'll be following the feedback loop discussion with interest.