dear lazyweb: rss/atom formats

[tritone]

Dear Professor Lazyweb

Comments

Atom, RSS 2.0

[anonymous]

FWIW, Adobe Media Player implements support for Atom, RSS 2.0, and other flavors of RSS, but we find that the first two cover a large majority of active feeds today.

[waider]

Having done this very thing myself for a dozen or so feeds, I can tell you that the problem is not so much 'which RSS version' as 'why the hell can't they actually comply with the version they chose?' Something like Perl's XML::RSS can at least attempt to parse most of what you throw at it, but Atom is handled by a separate stack of modules. Plus, you probably don't want to do this in Perl anyway.

[tritone]

This is going to be a Flex/AIR thingy, so it's going to be ActionScript. Groveling XML is pretty easy in AS with E4X (an XML query minilanguage that's a syntactic extension to AS), and I don't need to pull too much deep stuff out of the RSS/Atom for what I'm doing, so hopefully it won't be too bad...