Anne van Kesteren

Bloglines and feeds

This is not one of those switching posts. This is just to show you how broken some implementations are:

An image illustrating how broken the implementation of Atom 1.0 is in bloglines. Spaces adjacent to elements are erased and markup is parsed like it is HTML. Hurray!

Switching might happen eventually, they might also surprise me with a nice implementation of Atom 1.0 that actually follows the rules.

Bah. Fortunately Firefox 1.6a does support object without the type attribute (which in reality should be just a hint). Added the attribute for now.

Comments

  1. Yeah I switched to Rojo which is -- I guess -- just broken in different ways. Ah well. Someone has yet to impress me with a web-based feed reader.

    Posted by Turnip at

  2. Hey Anne, why don't you (or your company) build the best web based feed reader? It'd be extremely interesting to see what kind of product would rise out of a group of techie bloggers working making a web based feed reader.

    Posted by Devon at

  3. I've contacted Bloglines twice now regarding their problems with Atom 1.0. Hopefully this time something will actually happen - it can't take that long to get rid of the truncation of whitespace near the tags...

    The day that they manage to parse Atom 1.0 correctly is the day I scrap all RDF/RSS and go all out Atom.

    Posted by Patrick at

  4. Just out of interest, Google Reader seems to completely strip the object element out of this post of yours. It's not only Bloglines that suck it seems, although Google Reader does seem to be a bit more solid than Bloglines in general (haven't done any testing yet though).

    Posted by Charl van Niekerk at

  5. I never actually read the news in bloglines. I open them in new tabs. Two reasons:

    1. Seeing the pages design reminds me of who I'm reading, and what they've said in the past. A design is as much a potrayal of the author as their words.
    2. Bloglines is ugly. It doesn't have to be pretty, but it does it's job of aggregation. Plus I don't have to deal with the problems like you've mentioned above, b/c I'm always reading at the person's site. Plus there is less inhibiting me from commenting (click the link, wait, find comments.. instead of reading and the comments form is right there waiting for me)

    Posted by JohnO at

  6. Norm Walsh reported this issue quite a long time ago. And even then it wasn’t at all new. I’m rather disappointed that such a dumb bug has been around for the better part of a year with no fix in sight.

    Posted by Aristotle Pagaltzis at

  7. Just a FYI: The object element does render in Safari 1.3.1, but does so in a compressed manner, forcing one to utilize the contextual menu to "Open Image in..." to view the graphic at its actual/full dimensions. Quite irritating.

    Posted by someone at

  8. I got sick of waiting for Bloglines to fix this and wrote a Greasemonkey script to workaround the problem in the meantime.

    Posted by Simon at