Comments - MSDNDevelopment - Duncan Mackenzie .NET

application/rss+xml vs. text/xml

2007-11-15T13:31:00

Yay lets pervert html and xml into offshoot formats and protcols in an effort to lockin users to rss and podcast clients..

This is going to be like herding cats.. This is why I don't use any Microsoft languages.. Pervert the language, lockin the developers.. What doesn't everyone use PHP? Obscurity is job security.

FYI, I'm writing a web-based podcatcher.. And thinking about just open sourcing it.. So we can do away with all this xml perversion rubbish..

Screw the rss and podcast clients.. Nobody is going to download iTunes if they can mass download files with downthemall or a plugin that might combine that and a bit-torrent..

Send the jobs to china, see if I care, I can paint and do other things, I don't need to be a stinkin web programmer..

application/rss+xml vs. text/xml

2007-06-08T11:14:00

I'm finding that application/rss xml isn't recognized by IE6, so for backwards compatibility, you should use application/xml (IE7 and FF2 recognize it just fine). It's odd, though, because the IETF has pushed a standard through, but it isn't in the IANA's list of standard MIME types.

application/rss+xml vs. text/xml

2007-03-06T08:43:00

Your blog is realy show

application/rss+xml vs. text/xml

2007-02-28T09:04:00

it works well to use application/rss xml it is a RFC in rss 2.0
http://www.rssboard.org/rss-mime-type-application.txt

But i have found out that IE7 doesn not take UTF-16, so you NEED to implement charset=utf-8 if your using text/xml or application/*... */xml

ALWAYS specify encoding if your sending over http :) :)

application/rss+xml vs. text/xml

2007-01-26T00:13:00

I'm curious as to why the comment form says "basic HTML is allowed", but my p and list tags weren't processed.

application/rss+xml vs. text/xml

2007-01-26T00:11:00

<p>I am working on modifying a WordPress theme right now, and I based it off their classic theme. I was looking at the feed links in the header, and for some reason, the classic theme is setup as follows:</p>
<ul>
<li>Atom 0.3-application/atom xml</li>
<li>RSS .92-text/xml</li>
<li>RSS 2.0-application/rss xml</li>
</ul>
<p>So I looked up the IANA MIME types, and sure enough, application/rss xml is not an official type. So I put all my RSS feeds in application/xml in the link tag. However, neither IE7 nor Firefox 2.0 does not display the feed icon for the feeds when they are linked this way. So, I guess I am going with the non-standard application/rss xml.</p>

Pageviews are Obsolete

2006-09-11T19:19:00

Let's see if I can comment from IE, as FF doesn't seem to work (dang Microsofties! It's a conspiracy!)

Of course, agreed on PageViews. After all, the easiest way of upping your page views is to spread content across multiple pages *cough* developer.com *cough*. The content is no more useful -- in fact I'd argue it's less useful -- but "The numbers look better." Sadly, PVs are the numbers marketers know, and until there is agreement on something better, the world won't change.

Beta versions of the MSDN home page now available...

2006-08-30T22:46:00

I can't be bothered with anything these days, but such is life. I don't care. So it goes. More or less nothing seems worth thinking about. I've just been hanging out waiting for something to happen, but that's how it is.

Beta versions of the MSDN home page now available...

2006-08-30T01:48:00

I just don't have anything to say right now. I haven't been up to anything recently, but it's not important. I've just been sitting around waiting for something to happen, but shrug.

Beta versions of the MSDN home page now available...

2006-08-26T03:23:00

I haven't been up to anything recently, but so it goes. Such is life. What can I say? Pretty much not much exciting going on to speak of. I haven't gotten much done lately, but I don't care.

Beta versions of the MSDN home page now available...

2006-08-24T19:01:00

I've just been staying at home waiting for something to happen, but I don't care. Basically nothing seems worth thinking about. I can't be bothered with anything recently.

Beta versions of the MSDN home page now available...

2006-08-24T01:23:00

My life's been pretty dull recently. Shrug. My mind is like a void. I haven't gotten anything done lately. I can't be bothered with anything recently.

Another little .Text update...

2006-06-30T14:04:00

Hey man

Lead Developer position available with MSDN

2006-06-30T13:46:00

Hey

A bug in my RSS generator, but is it really invalid?

2006-06-30T13:46:00

Hey

application/rss+xml vs. text/xml

2005-12-13T04:22:00

Both your RSS 2.0 and Atom 1.0 feeds look fine. However, as all of the characters in these feeds are pure ASCII, there is no way to tell just by looking at the feeds whether or not you handle encoding issues properly.

I would suggest trying the suggestions mentioned here:

http://intertwingly.net/stories/2004/04/14/i18n.html

Both Iñtërnâtiônàlizætiøn and “smart quotes”… note, I’m entering this from Firefox on Linux — you should try from IE6 on Windows.

application/rss+xml vs. text/xml

2005-12-12T20:13:00

Serve your feeds as "Content-type: application/atom+xml", "Content-type: application/rss+xml", or "Content-type: application/xml". Any of these three choices will allow you to declare your charset properly within the feed, and avoid all kinds of RFC 3023-related weirdness. All three are supported by all major feed consumers.

Declare your charset properly in the encoding attribute of the xml declaration on the first line of the feed. Contrary to what you may have heard (cough Joshua Allen cough), getting your character encoding right is a prerequisite for producing well-formed XML.

Link to your feeds with an autodiscovery link with type="application/atom+xml" (this will soon be an RFC and already has a <a href="http://diveintomark.org/tests/client/autodiscovery/">test suite</a>) or type="application/rss+xml". Both of these are widely supported by feed consumers. No other type values are widely recognized.

Oh, by the way, Dave Winer knows very little about XML, even less about character encoding, and absolutely jack about media types. Ignore anything he says, you'll live longer.

application/rss+xml vs. text/xml

2005-12-12T15:27:00

Phil... I don't know about IE7 either, I just know that IE6 attempts to download Sam's feed, after seeing application/rss+xml as its encoding...

application/rss+xml vs. text/xml

2005-12-12T15:25:00

D'oh. Maybe I could remember clear back to last week's last post to know that you don't have IE7 installed.

application/rss+xml vs. text/xml

2005-12-12T15:21:00

Well, you should only switch the autodiscovery links in your HTML if you want them to not be discovered: there are probably a few implementations that will autodiscover a type="application/xml" link, but many more that won't. There's no requirement that the type be what you actually serve: it's an "advisory type," not a guarantee.

The type for the feed itself is a no-fun question, but I do have one question, as a non-MSDN member and thus non-IE7 user: do you mean that IE7 doesn't know about application/rss+xml and insists on downloading it rather than displaying it?

Just spent way too much time fixing VB code coloring on MSDN2

2005-11-17T14:48:00

I think you have a point there Bill, I believe I added in too many lists... MsgBox and CallByName are built-in Functions, but not keywords...

Just spent way too much time fixing VB code coloring on MSDN2

2005-11-17T04:08:00

Hey Duncan,

MsgBox and CallByBName aren't keywords AFAIK. Here, they aren't coloured in the IDE.

BTW: I ahve code colouring code for the VB snipept Editor which you are welcome to borrow. It will need tweaking to deal with escaped html though.

Just spent way too much time fixing VB code coloring on MSDN2

2005-11-17T04:08:00

Hey Duncan,

MsgBox and CallByBName aren't keywords AFAIK. Here, they aren't coloured in the IDE.

BTW: I have code colouring code for the VB snipept Editor which you are welcome to borrow. It will need tweaking to deal with escaped html though.

Gave a talk earlier today about how we built MSDN2...

2005-11-11T05:34:00

Looks like there's a tiny bug in your XML documentation -> MSDN2 converstion.

"Registering a T:System.Web.Hosting.VirtualPathProvider
A custom VirtualPathProvider..."

RSS feed authoring for those without blog software or an enjoyment of typing angle brackets

2005-11-03T19:33:00

Look forward to seeing it ;-)

A bug in my RSS generator, but is it really invalid?

2005-09-27T12:07:00

That is exactly it Mike, but the charset is actually part of the MIME type ... to avoid issues though, I will be stripping it off in the future versions of the generator...

Doing interesting things with XSL

2005-08-12T09:03:00

Sorry, previous response was dumb. It will give you the same values each time on the same document (although it would be random when the contents of the site changed).

However, something like this will work -- just supply a $seed argument along with your $numberToShow:

<xsl:apply-templates select="channel/item" >
<xsl:sort select="substring(substring-after( position() div $seed ,'.'),3,5)"
data-type="number"/>
<xsl:apply-templates>

... the above assumes a positive/large seed number but you can obviously adapt if you're using a fractional seed number.

>L<

Doing interesting things with XSL

2005-08-12T08:20:00

>>Out of the full list, display n randomly picked items

How about using generate-id(), which will be pretty random on each run, and then sort by the generate-id()?

Another little .Text update...

2005-01-28T14:33:00

Thomas is correct. managingEditor is optional, so removing the tag would also be valid. If it does exist, it is supposed to be a valid email address, but it can be missed.

TTFN - Kent

Another little .Text update...

2005-01-27T05:24:00

That's exactly what I described in http://asp.net/Forums/ShowPost.aspx?tabindex=1&PostID=434771 . Another option is removing the managingEditor tag, if you don't want to expose your email address. The feed will still be valid without that tag.

I'm leaving the MSDN Content Team...

2004-10-18T15:13:00

Welcome to the Team, Duncan! Now you'll be allowed to sit with us at lunch! ;)

Supporting LiveBookmarks in FireFox 1.0

2004-10-18T10:38:00

>Auto-discovery in RSS Bandit and a few other programs should have ceased to work against these pages

RSS Bandit uses a number of heuristics for locating the RSS feed for a page. Using the auto discovery link is merely step 1 of a four step process. So it is unlikely that change alone would have broken that feature in RSS Bandit.

I'm leaving the MSDN Content Team...

2004-10-17T12:33:00

Thanks Sriram, I'll probably still write, that wasn't really part of the Content Strategist job... it is more something that I do on my personal time... but without a doubt there will be a reduced # of articles coming out of me :)

I'm leaving the MSDN Content Team...

2004-10-17T12:00:00

I'll miss your articles - they were always chock-full of technical content - but usually done with an amazingly fun app that made you smack your head and go "Why didnt I think of that?".

New MSDN RSS feeds are live...

2004-10-12T17:54:00

Hey, You added attributes to the RSS feeds so that people might be able to sift through them programatically.I was going to advocate that....

New MSDN RSS feeds are live...

2004-10-06T06:34:00

I think that the MSDN feeds are great, but they have one major drawback: there is a lot of unnecessary duplication. For example, I went out and added the Visual Studio 2005 feed and got articles about ADO.NET 2.0 query notifications and ASP.NET 2.0 profiles. Both nice things to know, but not related to Visual Studio. If I want to also subscribe to the ASP.NET feed, I'll get the same ASP.NET article in both of those places (and probably in others as well, such as the SQL feed).

Also, the "Visual Studio" feed also includes articles about VS 2005, so if I subscribe to both, I get those items twice. This sort of thing makes the targeted feeds less useful.

I've been working on a new RSS generation system for MSDN for the past little while

2004-09-30T12:54:00

News feed doesn't display correctly in Thunderbird. Thunderbird reads the post fine, and displays the basic information (subject, author, date) but when selected doesn't display the summary/description and link information - just a blank window. Visual C# seems to be the only MS feet that does this (of the one i look at regurlarly: MSDN: ASP.NET, MSDN: Visual C#, MSDN Just posted, ...)

I've been working on a new RSS generation system for MSDN for the past little while

2004-09-27T22:11:00

why can't you make halo2 no ps2 the reasonis i go over to my frends place so i can play halo1 so can you ask sony to put out halo2 out please thank you.

I've been working on a new RSS generation system for MSDN for the past little while

2004-09-27T12:00:00

An OPML rolling all of these up would just rule...

I've been working on a new RSS generation system for MSDN for the past little while

2004-09-27T04:01:00

Update: Yep, it works fine now in FireFox, thanks!

I wish more RSS feeds would attach a stylesheet... Thanks for setting a good example.

I've been working on a new RSS generation system for MSDN for the past little while

2004-09-27T00:37:00

One quick note: the stylesheet seems to be working correctly in IE only. FireFox recognizes the stylesheet, but the result doesn't seem to be HTML at all, but one large line of text. I am not into stylesheeting enough to figure out what is going wrong, but it looks like some mime-type or namespace issue to me. If I download the feed and the stylesheet separately, and apply the stylesheet manually, the resulting html file displays just fine, so it seems to be an issue with applying the stylesheet.