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On Jan 15, 2004, at 2:41 PM, Bob Wyman wrote:
>
> I would like to be "conservative" in what I generate, but the
> problem is that as an intermediary, I'm being fed a lot of stuff that
> was generated "liberally". So, I'm in a bind... One interpretation of
> Postel's law would say that I should do my best to output proper RSS
> V2.0 while being liberal about what I accept. However, another set of
> rules (i.e. intermediaries should minimize how much they muck with
> content passing through...) would force me to generate non-conforming
> feeds. How do I solve this dilemma?
>
I think the term "Service Oriented Architecture" might help organize
your thoughts: What service are you providing? Do you offer more than
one? How can the "customer" tell you about the service(s) they wish to
receive from you?. If you have the technical means, you could offer a
raw but routed feed and a filtered, routed feed. Even a semantically
cleaned up feed, as long as you document the rules (e.g., "we'll use
the current date as the starting point for any guesses about an
ambiguous date.") It depends on what problems your consumers are
trying to solve with the data you provide.
Likewise, consider whatever you do as an experiment, sortof like
Amazon offering both a REST and SOAP/WSDL interface to their services.
Learn from the successes and failures of the people downstream (and
whatever success or failure you have in convincing upstream people to
clean up their data). And let the rest of us know what you learn!
Don't worry too much about Postel's "Laws" or any of this other stuff.
I'm sure plenty of people will give you opposing advice (or
authoritative declarations that you are totally wrong, broken, and
clueless) no matter which you do or what combinations you offer. My
only advice is to remember that you are exploring the unknown; nobody
REALLY knows what will work, what will break, and which of today's
standards and best practices will be taken seriously 5 or 10 years from
now. It's possible that doing the expedient thing to keep customers
happy will pollute the memespace and keep XML/RSS/Atom/whatever from
reaching its full potential. It's certain, however, that it won't
reach its full potential if it is stillborn for lack of ability to
solve real problems for real people.
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