RSS Compliance, and the lack thereof

Of the 30 RSS urls I tried to subscribe my little aggregator to last night, almost all from well read blogs, 5 failed to parse with XML::RSS. (only a handful validated, but we’ll talk about that some other time)

1. – the RSS feed from peerfearbecause of a bug in XML::RSS and its handling of namespaces, as discussed on RSS-DEV.

2. – a feed from a Moveable Type blog, in spanish, included the character encoding ú (“&uacute”), which seems to choke up both XML::RSS and the RSS Validator

3. – and 3 feeds produced by Blogger Pro

• boingboing’s – validate
• randomwalk’s – validate
• evhead’s – validate

The Blogger Pro feeds all included random punctuation problems, &s and © and random other junk. This is very annoying, and seems strange from a company you would expect to be on top of this sort of thing. boingboing and rw could complain to blogger, but I’m not sure who evhead would complain to.