Library Web Chic

RSS Incompatibility Issues

Recently, I found an interesting post
that discussed the incompatibility issues that exist within RSS. This
is a topic that I am not alltogether unfamilar with because about a
year ago I started playing with incorporating RSS feeds into my site.
The problem with this is that not all RSS feeds are alike. There are a
multitude of specification for RSS feeds. Check out my feed and then check out Steven Cohen's Library Stuff RSS feed. My feed is RSS 2.0 while Steven's is 1.0. If
you only have a specific feed you want to incorporate into your site
the problem is greatly reduced. You simply need to know what version of
RSS that feed is written in and write the XSL accordingly. However, if
you want to be able incorporate many different feeds into your site
you need to take all the different specifications into account and
develop your code accordingly. If you want to build your own news
aggregator you will encounter the same issues.Thus far, the best way I
have found to deal with the incompatibility issue is to use the DOM to
check to see what version of RSS you are dealing with then have a
stylesheet for each version. This may not been the simplest way to deal
with the problem but it does work.