I’d recommend using the Atom syndication format over RSS. It’s been around for decades, every RSS reader supports it, but it’s not burdened with as much historical baggage and guesswork as RSS.
For validation, the W3C has a validator, based on their HTML validator.
I’d say that the difference between RSS and Atom is like that between HTML and XHTML. One is loose, the other strict, and sometimes the strict one doesn’t allow something that you actually desire. So RSS may be a good choice sometimes.
Since Atom is a proper XML format, it allows anything, being highly extensible.
The various RSS variants can allow for anything too, but especially with RSS2 the underspecification means getting anything more than title+link to work reliably is a nightmare.
Definitely. RSS1 is a weird abuse of RDF, RSS2 somehow got the same name but is an underspecified worse abuse of XML. Atom at least has a design and uses the host format proprly.
I would very much appreciate a proper Atom/RSS feed as well. Your blog’s the only one I have to use nitter to get notifications of posts through, it makes reading it in my feed reader a bit jarring; worth it, though. :)
haha, I’m flattered :p I can’t remember at what point I started using + so often in variable substitution, but it’s quite useful. It’s pretty easy to misuse it and make the mechanism of a script even more obscure sometimes because of how versatile it can be for templating-related purposes, though.
should probably be
Thanks, fixed!
Slightly off-topic: is there an RSS feed for the blog? I’d be interested in following it.
I usually direct people to the reddit RSS feed for /r/oilshell, link here: http://www.oilshell.org/
Although it could be time to make a proper one for the blog. Does anyone have an example of a good RSS feed? I haven’t used RSS myself in many years.
How do you validate it? with an XML validator or something else? Pointers to example code would be useful too.
When I google I find a lot of spammy stuff and links about how to consume RSS feeds, not create them.
I’d recommend using the Atom syndication format over RSS. It’s been around for decades, every RSS reader supports it, but it’s not burdened with as much historical baggage and guesswork as RSS.
For validation, the W3C has a validator, based on their HTML validator.
I’d say that the difference between RSS and Atom is like that between HTML and XHTML. One is loose, the other strict, and sometimes the strict one doesn’t allow something that you actually desire. So RSS may be a good choice sometimes.
Since Atom is a proper XML format, it allows anything, being highly extensible.
The various RSS variants can allow for anything too, but especially with RSS2 the underspecification means getting anything more than title+link to work reliably is a nightmare.
The differences are quite minor, and most feed readers can deal with slight misconfigurations.
The comparison with XHTML is apt, the Syndication Wars were raging when XHTML was seen as the future of the web.
Definitely. RSS1 is a weird abuse of RDF, RSS2 somehow got the same name but is an underspecified worse abuse of XML. Atom at least has a design and uses the host format proprly.
I would very much appreciate a proper Atom/RSS feed as well. Your blog’s the only one I have to use nitter to get notifications of posts through, it makes reading it in my feed reader a bit jarring; worth it, though. :)
If it’s worth anything, here’s the script I use to generate my site’s Atom feeds. https://git.mutiny.red/somasis/www.somas.is/plain/atom.sh
Actually the example helps a lot, that’s what i was asking for :)
https://github.com/oilshell/oil/issues/902 (feel free to bug me here if it doesn’t happen in a few months)
BTW I’m impressed by your use of this idiom:
It took me awhile to figure out what the
+operator was actually useful for, and this kind of templating is the only real use I see for it!haha, I’m flattered :p I can’t remember at what point I started using
+so often in variable substitution, but it’s quite useful. It’s pretty easy to misuse it and make the mechanism of a script even more obscure sometimes because of how versatile it can be for templating-related purposes, though.Ah, but the reddit feed has posts that aren’t from the blog, too.
Reading the RSS 2.0 spec is a good start.
If the feed is bad — i.e. broken XML, the browser will complain. At least, that’s how I do it, heh.