Extensibility working against me

Spent a couple of hours hacking on the blog PHP code. It's not possible to post comments yet, but I did add a simple RSS 1.0 feed. There was a bit of a problem with getting Firefox to use it as a Live Bookmark; no entries were being displayed. Firefox would either show "(empty)" or report that it failed to load the feed.

The feed validated with both feedvalidator.org and rss.scripting.com. I have written the code for a couple of feeds before; those could be Live Bookmarked. RSS 1.0 feeds on other sites also worked fine with Firefox.

While I had my doubts about the Firefox RSS parsing code, it turned out to be an embarrassingly simple error on my part: the channel element included too much. You'd expect an RSS validator to catch something like that, but neither of them could because the RSS spec is so permissive. Embracing an extensible format can be painful.

24 November, 2004