Augh, the feed for the uber cool Rocketboom video blog is broken causing Radio to choke on the feed...
The problems is a very simple one, the '<' and '>' characters are not being escaped. This causes the html tags in the description to be interpreted as extra xml elements.
I've emailed Rocketboom and hopefully I can help them fix the problem. update: received a response from Drew at Rocketboom and the feed has been fixed.
I also made a minor fix to Radio's aggregator that allows it to compile the feed. This of course brought me to the question: Should we be compiling invalid feeds?
The answer I came up with is: 'It depends' :)
In this case I think we should, all the required information is in the RSS feed. There is just some extra information not defined in the RSS spec. In the goal of ease of use for the user I think a good Aggregator should just drop the extra information.
I know, I know... if all Aggregators do this aren't we allowing content producers to get away with publishing sloppy feeds? In essence : Yes. But it is more of a question of who's responsibility is it to ensure that the feed is valid. I would argue that it is certainly not the Aggregator user.
In my mind the best case would be an Aggregator that silently notifies a central database that the feed did not validate and why. This database could then be searched by the content publisher allowing them to see if their feed is causing problems in various Aggregators.
Perhaps someone should offer this as a service...
