The toman diaries

RSS validity

lørdag, februar 07, 2004

In an effort to improve a stylesheet for RSS, I went googling for +http OR +www OR +the filetype:rss OR filetype:rdf OR filetype:atom. The search returned 241.000 results. Seing how XML is used in many none-rss applications like web-pages, I excluded that type.

Anyway, if you are interested: The stylesheet worked perfectly on 87.875% of the first 800 feeds, leaving 12,125% barely readable. The percentage was the same in the first 400, indicating no difference in implementation between high and low rank/status pages. The feeds that don't work are mainly specific namespaces like foaf, but a few also have invalid RSS markup (but only 3 feeds were invalid XML). About 0.8% are styled with CSS themselves, while approx 3% are served as text/plain (which I didn't count).

Why 400 at the time? Because I got tired in my left little-finger from holding down ctrl+shift while opening the pages in the background in Opera. - Thats right, I ran RSS feeds in 400 pages simultanously. Yes, RSS is light, but 400 is quite a lot anyway. It's so many I didn't see a page button at all with 1280 solution.