Subject: Re: partial xml in atom:content ?

From: Robert Sayre <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 17 Jan 2006 19:57:09 -0500

> I wouldn't either, but I wouldn't expect an Atom aggregator to fail to subscribe to such a feed,
> which is what happened to Thunderbird on my test feed [1]

Heh. Twice in one day. That's an unrelated bug.

More to the point, I can't see what you're trying to accomplish here.
You found a way to make a valid Atom feed that's useless. There are
lots of ways to do that.

--

Robert Sayre

"I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time."

---

From: "James Holderness" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 18 Jan 2006 01:56:52 -0000

> Heh. Twice in one day. That's an unrelated bug.

I suspected it was probably unrelated. I tried to reproduce it with a 
simpler case and it didn't have any problems subscribing. I just didn't have 
time to experiment any more. If you want another problem to investigate, try 
subscribing to this:
http://216.93.169.119/atomtests/simple.atom

There are 2 entries in that feed, but for some reason Thunderbird only shows 
1. I can't figure out why.

> You found a way to make a valid Atom feed that's useless. There are

I'm not sure if you've been following this thread but earlier on it was 
asked whether it would be valid and/or safe to include an xml document 
fragment in a content element labeled with a MIME type. My hypothesis was 
that it was quite likely to work with xhtml document fragments for anyone 
that actually supported the type at all. I put together that test so I could 
see whether my hypothesis was true. Of the 15 aggregators I tested, 5 failed 
to support application/xhtml+xml at all. All the rest were quite capable of 
handling document fragments (and some in fact failed when the content wasn't 
a document fragment).

In short, I was trying to verify an hypothesis.

Regards
James

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From: Graham Parks <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 18 Jan 2006 05:03:07 +0000

On 18 Jan 2006, at 3:06 am, James Holderness wrote:

>> The problem it that proving something is "quite likely to work"  
>> says nothing about "whether it would be valid and/or safe", even  
>> in the limited context of XHTML.
>
> True, but sometimes people have to make decisions based on the  
> limited information available to them. Knowing that something is  
> "quite likely to work" is better than not knowing anything at all.

No it isn't.

> As for validity, as far as I'm concerned that isn't even in  
> question. I ran the feed through the feedvalidator and it said it  
> was valid. Granted the feedvalidator isn't always right, but my  
> reading of the spec reached the same conclusion. If you think the  
> feedvalidator is wrong, I'd suggest you file a bug report or post  
> to the feedvalidator mailing list.

Oh for fuck sake. The feed validator can only check whether something  
is syntactically correct. It cannot check whether it's semantically  
correct (ie means what you think it means). I'm sure you know this  
and are just being an asshat.

Graham

---

From: "James Holderness" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 18 Jan 2006 05:53:09 -0000

Graham Parks wrote:
>> True, but sometimes people have to make decisions based on the  limited 
>> information available to them. Knowing that something is  "quite likely 
>> to work" is better than not knowing anything at all.
>
> No it isn't.

Ok. If you like working in the dark I'm not going to try and convince you 
otherwise. I've provided what information I have for anyone that might find 
it helpful. If it's not helpful to you, feel free to ignore it.

> Oh for fuck sake. The feed validator can only check whether something  is 
> syntactically correct. It cannot check whether it's semantically  correct 
> (ie means what you think it means). I'm sure you know this  and are just 
> being an asshat.

Take a deep breath. I'm not being deliberately obtuse here, but I haven't 
the faintest idea what you are talking about anymore. I was under the 
impression that you were complaining about the use of partial xhtml 
fragments inside content labeled with type="application/xhtml+xml". The 
feedvalidator is quite capable of checking for that and in fact it does 
check for that. However it only warns you rather than reporting it as an 
error because it's considered a recommendation rather than a requirement.

If that's not it, you're going to have to be a whole lot more specific about 
this semantic error that the feedvalidator can't detect. Or you could 
continue to assume I'm being an asshat and move on to something more 
productive.

Regards
James