Ian Bicking: Syndication: boring war where only egos are hurt

the Syndication Wars -- they're like the Browser Wars, only much more boring and with far less at stake (reference)

In other news: OMG, silent data loss, the sky is falling! If I panicked this way everytime I realized I had to apply HTML quoting, I would have gray hair and ulcers by now. To summarize the silent data loss in question: Reuters has text like "Enron Corp. <ENRNQ.PK>" in their feed, and all aggregators treat the description as HTML, and so it gets interpreted as HTML with a <ENRNQ.PK> tag in it.

The silly part is that RSS 2.0, lame though it is, clearly has a standard in this case. Like the article says it wasn't that some aggregators had a problem -- they all did. Which is to say, according to the functional, implemented RSS standard (embodied in the aggregators, not the spec), the Reuters feed was incorrect. It was not "invalid", it was semantically incorrect. Such bugs should be familiar to any working programmer.

Oh well. In the end it's all pretty boring. Sorry for wasting your time.