[nashashmi]

10 percent of the effort in building software compatibility with open source file specifications is dealing with knowing the specifications. 90 percent of the effort is dealing with errors in generated files by less worthy software programs.

The RSS spec is one way. RSS readers do a fine job of interpreting files done the right way. Publishers don’t always do a good job with publishing error free RSS files. So RSS readers devs have to anticipate all sorts of errors and conduct error handling to ensure RSS items are properly handled.

This is why companies want to keep their file format proprietary. Other devs can really do damage to the ecosystem and ruin the experience

[EvanAnderson]

My personal fork of ttrss, from 2005, is a dodgy patchwork of fixes for badly formatted RSS. I can't imagine trying to host a service that deals with RSS feeds from random sites at scale.

[tracker1]

One that always irks me to no end, is every time I see someone ham fisting csv handling by hand instead of using an established, well-sourced library. They almost always fail at commas or newlines in quoted text... It's one of the more annoying things.

Currently working on replacing a couple decades old system, and my csv output is using a library that isn't quoting all the strings that don't require quotes... so I'm forced to do it (for compatibility) with the other system this csv is going to. (sigh).