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RE: [Help] url of a feed is shown partially

littant — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 19:13:53 GMT

[quote][b]critter42 (4/19/2008)[/b][hr][quote][b]littant (4/18/2008)[/b][hr]Sigh... Is it necessary to be so mad? I am not demanding anyone to do anything. All I want to know is whether I set up FD properly or whether it will be fixed if it is a bug of FD.[/quote]

Yes, it is necessary - this is one of my biggest pet peeves - I have low tolerance for acceptance of sloppy work. Asking Nick to accommodate a broken feed rather than demanding the feed author make the effort to fix his own work is tantamount to saying "you don't want to fix it? Oh, Ok then, instead of holding you to a standard, I'll just ask someone else to compensate for your inablility to clean up your mess."

Nick might be nice enough to do it, but even just asking him to do so is placing the burden of responsibility in the wrong place - on Nick's shoulders rather than the feed author's. Nick might not mind, but it's not right to ask him - ask the feed author to fix his feed instead - it's his responsibility.[/quote]

I have been using both FD and [url=http://www.curiostudio.com/]GreatNews[/url] for a long time. I personally favor FD more, although both of them can meet my daily use requirement. I found GN can handle the feed I mentioned above, while FD cannot. Therefore I posted this thread in order to find out why. And that is all.

By the way, I agree it is the feed author's responsibility to follow the standard, so please, don't write another a few paragraphes to argue about this or jump out from nowhere accusing anyone who stands in front of you.

[quote][b]Nick Bradbury (4/19/2008)[/b][hr]Fair enough, but look at it from the viewpoint of someone just trying to read a feed who finds that it doesn't work right. Chances are, they'll report the problem to the aggregator developer, not the feed author. Even though the developer isn't the source of the problem, the developer can't simply say "the feed is invalid" and expect the customer to figure out how to contact the feed's author and tell them to fix their feed.

When a feed is truly broken, I can't do anything about it. But there has to be a certain level of tolerance for errors such a relative URLs, or else feed reading just plain won't work. If I refused to handle any invalid feed, then customers would be prevented from reading a huge number of feeds - and they'd switch to an aggregator that was more tolerant.

Trust me, I share your pet peeve - it's frustrating (understatement) having to spend time working around problems in other people's feeds. But as much as I'd like everyone to publish valid feeds, the truth is that malformed data will be with us for a very long time. Developers are going to have to deal with this if they expect to create mainstream web applications.[/quote]

Hi Nick, thanks for your hard work. I just installed FD 2.6.1.4 RC 2 today, and would like to report that it is able to handle the above feed now.

RE: [Help] url of a feed is shown partially

Nick Bradbury — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 20:25:07 GMT

Fair enough, but look at it from the viewpoint of someone just trying to read a feed who finds that it doesn't work right. Chances are, they'll report the problem to the aggregator developer, not the feed author. Even though the developer isn't the source of the problem, the developer can't simply say "the feed is invalid" and expect the customer to figure out how to contact the feed's author and tell them to fix their feed.

RE: [Help] url of a feed is shown partially

critter42 — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 18:28:22 GMT

[quote][b]littant (4/18/2008)[/b][hr]Sigh... Is it necessary to be so mad? I am not demanding anyone to do anything. All I want to know is whether I set up FD properly or whether it will be fixed if it is a bug of FD.[/quote]

RE: [Help] url of a feed is shown partially

littant — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 20:06:06 GMT

[quote][b]critter42 (4/17/2008)[/b][hr]No, that's NOT the key point - the key point is this feed has major issues that need to be fixed.

This is the attitude just gets me - that it's the aggregator's function to handle any feed, regardless of whether the feed is to spec or not. I say it isn't. *THIS FEED ISN'T VALID* - IT DOES NOT MEET THE STANDARDS TO CALL ITSELF RSS! It is NOT the responsibility of the aggregators to wade through every crap feed out there. There are standards for a reason and the line has to be drawn somewhere. Feed authors need to be responsible for the garbage data they release, not the aggregator. If some choose to work with feeds as screwed up feeds as that, that's their business. Nick already bends over backwards (too far, IMNSHO) to try to make feeds that shouldn't be accepted work.

How about this - instead of asking the aggregator to cope with crap, ask the feed author to get his feed in standards - or at least stop using the relative URLs which is the most egregious problem and the cause of the issue you're reporting. If he does, I guarantee he will find much more acceptance.[/quote]

Sigh... Is it necessary to be so mad? I am not demanding anyone to do anything. All I want to know is whether I set up FD properly or whether it will be fixed if it is a bug of FD.

[quote][b]Nick Bradbury (4/18/2008)[/b][hr]Each of the posts in that feed has a relative <link>, which usually wouldn't be an issue since FeedDemon "completes" these relative URLs using the feed's <link>. This feed, however, has a relative URL for the feed <link>, so FeedDemon can't determine the completed link to each post.

What I should do in this situation is attempt to complete relative URLs by using the feed's URL (ie: the actual URL of the feed). I'll add this change to the next build.

As pointed out, though, this feed has a lot of problems, so I can't guarantee that it will ever work "correctly" in FeedDemon even with that change.[/quote]

Hi Nick, thanks for you reply, which is more constructive. It is OK if you do not add this change, if this modification will impair the stability and efficiency of FD. It is not worth it.

RE: [Help] url of a feed is shown partially

Nick Bradbury — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 11:26:01 GMT

Each of the posts in that feed has a relative <link>, which usually wouldn't be an issue since FeedDemon "completes" these relative URLs using the feed's <link>. This feed, however, has a relative URL for the feed <link>, so FeedDemon can't determine the completed link to each post.

What I should do in this situation is attempt to complete relative URLs by using the feed's URL (ie: the actual URL of the feed). I'll add this change to the next build.

As pointed out, though, this feed has a lot of problems, so I can't guarantee that it will ever work "correctly" in FeedDemon even with that change.

Thanks,

RE: [Help] url of a feed is shown partially

critter42 — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 23:46:12 GMT

No, that's NOT the key point - the key point is this feed has major issues that need to be fixed.

This is the attitude just gets me - that it's the aggregator's function to handle any feed, regardless of whether the feed is to spec or not. I say it isn't. *THIS FEED ISN'T VALID* - IT DOES NOT MEET THE STANDARDS TO CALL ITSELF RSS! It is NOT the responsibility of the aggregators to wade through every crap feed out there. There are standards for a reason and the line has to be drawn somewhere. Feed authors need to be responsible for the garbage data they release, not the aggregator. If some choose to work with feeds as screwed up feeds as that, that's their business. Nick already bends over backwards (too far, IMNSHO) to try to make feeds that shouldn't be accepted work.

How about this - instead of asking the aggregator to cope with crap, ask the feed author to get his feed in standards - or at least stop using the relative URLs which is the most egregious problem and the cause of the issue you're reporting. If he does, I guarantee he will find much more acceptance.

RE: [Help] url of a feed is shown partially

littant — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 21:29:25 GMT

I know there are problems in the feed itself. But other RSS softwares (e.g. the one I mentioned above) are capable to handle it, while FD cannot. I think that is the key point.

Of course, let's see what Nick says first~ :)

RE: [Help] url of a feed is shown partially

Jack Brewster — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 20:49:19 GMT

FeedDemon is using the link as it's described in the feed, i.e.:

One thing to think about is that this feed doesn't validate - [url=http://feedvalidator.org/check.cgi?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.credom.org%2Fcblog%2Fu%2F4%2Frss2.xml]link[/url]. See specifically line 6 where I think the problem is starting.

Hard for me to say whether FD should be handling those links differently - I'll leave that up to Nick to determine. But the usual first step in troubleshooting feed-related problems is making sure the feed is valid.

[Help] url of a feed is shown partially

littant — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 20:20:40 GMT

I am currently using FeedDemon 2.6.1.3 RC1 and one of the RSS i subscribe to is http://www.credom.org/cblog/u/4/rss2.xml

In this feed, all the url behind the article titles are not complete. For example, in the case shown in the image, the proper url should be http://www.credom.org/cblog/u/4/archives/2008/2500.html (therefore, if I clicked the title, I will be directed to "cblog/u/4/archives/2008/2500.html", which leads me to nowhere, instead of http://www.credom.org/cblog/u/4/archives/2008/2500.html)

I first thought this is a problem caused by the rss itself. But later I use another software ([url=http://www.curiostudio.com/download.html]this one[/url]) to subscribe this feed, and I surprisedly found this problem did not exist at all. So I wonder whether it is a bug in FeedDemon or I just did not select proper options for this feed in FeedDemon.

[img]http://img132.imageshack.us/img132/8373/88491003sb4.png[/img]