NewsGator Craziness
Why is it that Tim Bray’s perfectly correct Atom feed is being converted into broken RSS2 by the time it goes through NewsGator and comes out in NetNewsWire? The reason I ask is that whenever Tim posts photos in a blog entry they wind up returning 404s from his direct feed, but work perfectly when they come through Planet Intertwingly. It’s crazy.
The actual feed content contains (excerpted):
<feed xml:base='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/ongoing.atom' … <entry xml:base='When/200x/2009/01/22/'> … <img src="PS082906.png" alt="Fog" />
When I view the XML source in NetNewsWire though, it’s been corrupted into an RSS2 feed and the image tag is now:
<img src="http://www.tbray.org/PS082906.png" alt="fog" />
I can understand NewsGator messing up the slightly more complex than normal usage of xml:base (despite it being a very annoying bug), but why on earth would it convert everything to an RSS2 feed?
January 23rd, 2009 at 4:10 am
Hi Adrian — the issue with the broken images on Tim’s feed is a known issue that we’ll fix.
The reason feeds are delivered to our syncing and API clients as RSS 2.0 is because it makes sense to deliver a uniform format to clients. These versions of the feeds are part of our API: they contain extra information such as NewsGator post ids, read/unread status, and so on.
In the end it doesn’t matter: if a client app gets the exact same information, does it matter what format the feed was?
(Why RSS? Because our platform is older than Atom.)
January 23rd, 2009 at 4:20 am
Hi Brent,
Yes, I can see the sense in it to a point, but it unfortunately breaks anything that NewsGator doesn’t explicitly know about. Essentially, the client app isn’t getting the same information. It’s not just this bug either – Atom supports distributed extensibility, but there’s no reason to believe that NewsGator knows about those extensions or that there’s an equivalent in RSS2. It doesn’t really matter for NetNewsWire or FeedBurner since they clearly wouldn’t support anything that NewsGator didn’t know about, but it would prevent 3rd party clients from supporting extensions.
Admittedly it’s not as stupid as my post may have made out – what can I say, I was frustrated by a bug at the time – but it is an unfortunate limiting factor of the syncing design.
January 23rd, 2009 at 4:51 am
The images bug doesn’t have anything to do with the format delivered to the client — and I just heard back from platform that a fix is in progress.
Remember that NetNewsWire and FeedDemon can run in stand-alone (non-synced) mode where they read feeds directly from the sources — but, even in stand-alone mode, they don’t support every extension and namespace under the sun. Every feed reader has to determine what it wants to handle and what to ignore. It’s not an issue specific to NewsGator’s platform, and our use of RSS in our API is still beside the point.
Sure, this can make people think twice about using something not widely supported, but that’s just the story of web technology.