All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

RSS feeds for Perl mailing lists

ziggy on 2003-05-26T02:28:05

TorgoX writes "There are now RSS feeds for all sorts of Perl mailing lists, at http://nntp.perl.org/rss/ The program that generates them runs every 15 minutes or so. The feeds are a bit experimental, so let me know if you have any trouble with them, or any suggestions for new features."

mismatched RSS info

kellan on 2003-05-27T05:12:52

I downloaded a copy of the perl.datetime RSS feed, and for my next few comments I'm assuming that its representative of most of the feeds.

The first thing I noticed is that the feeds are served as application/rdf+xml, but Mozilla asked me to download them, rather then display them as XML.

The next thing I noticed is that these are very unusual looking RSS feeds.

They look like they are essentially old style RSS 0.9 feeds (declare the RDF namespace, and My Netcenter namespaces, no modules, limited tagset) but they also include a sprinkling of tags from the non-RDF, Userland flavors of RSS, namely the tags: pubDate, webMaster, language, ttl, and guid. These tags don't exist in RSS 0.9, and go by different names in RSS 1.0, e.g. dc:date, dc:language, dc:publisher (or perhaps admin:errorReportsTo), etc.

Also missing are the textfield, and image tags which are required by RSS 0.9, but later made optional by all other versions.

Most aggregators will probably display at least something passable given these feeds, but it is a little inelegant to mix the specs like this. It would probably make sense to either: rename the Userland fields to their equivalent RSS 1.0 fields and change the default namespace to http://purl.org/rss/1.0/, or to strip out all the references to RDF and present it as a RSS 2.0 feed.

Thanks again for making the feeds available.

Re:mismatched RSS info

pudge on 2003-05-27T12:55:24

It looks odd to me, too. However, the RSS Validator says it is OK. It looks most like the mythical "RSS 2.0" to me, with the guid, but I couldn't tell you.

Re:mismatched RSS info

snowball on 2003-05-30T22:10:26

Hmmm, it does look like a really mixed up feed to me... RSS 0.9 namespace, loads of Dave Winer style elements.... since it's a Perl site why are they not using XML::RSS!?

Re:mismatched RSS info

djeaux on 2003-05-30T13:04:15

The first thing I noticed is that the feeds are served as application/rdf+xml, but Mozilla asked me to download them, rather then display them as XML.

Obviously, the same issue exists with Netscape 7. And I also noticed the "mix-and-match" approach. Probably would be prudent to pick one standard & stick with it...

That said, THANKS for all the newsfeeds!

Re:mismatched RSS info

snowball on 2003-05-30T21:56:05

The RSS 1.0 spec says that application/xml should be used till the RSS mime type is registered, howver loads of people are using the aplication/rss+xml mime type already to aid resource discovery... but I also find the fact that it wont open in mozilla really annoying so I'm still using application/xml ...