MS RSS Team Cares About Well Formed XML
You may have already heard that the Microsoft Team RSS Blog has an interesting post about their feed parser and well formed XML. IE7 will only support feeds that are well-formed XML!
What is disturbing is I found out about this from a blog post titled: Microsoft to break the web. A bit harsh don’t you think? In the past Microsoft did a damn good job of almost ruining the internet by doing exactly the opposite. Think about it, the various IE’s were extremely liberal in their parsing, and combining that with their own brand of standards led us to an internet where many sites would not even work on other, more standards compliant, browsers.
No, I think this is great. Will RSS feeds break, definitely; will the majority be fix quickly, most certainly. I’ve made my own RSS feeds before with other sites, and I’m pretty sure that if I don’t fix them by the time IE7 is release, none of those feeds will work. But since they are sites I actually care about, they will be fixed before IE7 is release, and if I still manage to not quite fix them correctly, they will definitely be fixed soon after.
I think it’s about bloody time that MS starts to pay proper attention to standards, and XML was supposed to be strict in the first place! Kudos to MS for doing what had to be done.
RSS Feed
