A fast way to get all the Right Wing members of Blogistan to adopt well-formed and valid XML:
On the Atom list, the well-formed feeds question is back, should aggregators attempt to parse broken feeds, or throw an error and refuse to process them?
There’s the Ultra Liberal Feed Parser that will munge most any batch of tag soup claiming to be RSS or Atom, but saying you’ll parse anything sent only encourages producers to be sloppy.
On the list, Henri Sivonen suggested educating users that sending broken feeds is uncool.
And in the current political climate, there’s one way to do it, leverage the foaming at the mouth reaction you get to the word ‘liberal’.
If Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh would denounce ‘liberal RSS parsers’ on air as a plot even more wicked than gay marriage, within hours, a large portion of the blogosphere would straighten up and emit valid and well formed data. The Lieberman bloggers would join in quickly as they wouldn’t want to be mistaken for Democrats.
