Hi, You raise quite a few questions, for which I'll give my two cents one at a time...
> If an old feed still exists, and if proves > to be valid RSS, should it be added? There has been some discussion about this in the past, with varying opinions. However, I think most or all would agree that a feed that hasn't had any new content added within the past year can be marked Dead. As the owner of some infrequently-updated blogs and feeds, I would caution against being more restrictive than a year. > 2. Secondly, what is the threshold for a feed to fail the validation > standards for syndic8? This is part of the human aspect of the review process, we each have our way of looking at it. As you say, if a feed doesn't validate, then it doesn't get approved. As I see it, if a feed has what appears to be one minor warning but everything else looks intact and valid, then I would approve it. What constitutes a minor warning is based on whether I think it would cause significant problems or not -- for example, the wrong MIME type can be a major problem for some clients, so that's not a minor warning. More than one warning, or a minor validator warning combined with other less-than-perfect attributes (missing language, or less than 100% availability, etc.) would lead to marking the feed for repair. > i. What is the ratio of people who submit feeds for > syndication that: > > a. Write the code to generate their own feed. > > b. Use some sort of a blog site or other CMS to generate their feed. I don't have any hard numbers to give you, but there might be some useful data in the Syndic8 stats. I would guess the vast majority do not write their own code. In fact, unless you really understand all the nuances of it, writing your own code is not recommended. (This didn't stop me from writing my own, of course, being somewhat rebellious and independent... but I've also made errors that weren't immediately obvious but which I had to go back in and fix.) > Assuming > that most of these invalid feeds come from people using a site or CMS, are > they using old software that needs updated, or is there a common site or > site software that has bugs? Buggy tools and buggy versions of otherwise-good tools can stick around for a long time, unfortunately. There are many tools that can be used, and the aggregate effect of each of those tools having problems with feed generation over time is that there are a lot of broken feeds out there. Hope this helps, -- Stuart Whitmore [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.just-stuart.com/ If you're getting "too much mail" then send a message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (this will tell it to stop sending you mail) To change your membership use THIS WEB PAGE: http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/syndic8/join (here you can set your mail to digest, no mail or LEAVE the list) To find more info about Syndicated XML newsfeeds visit http://www.syndic8.com/ Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/syndic8/ <*> Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional <*> To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/syndic8/join (Yahoo! ID required) <*> To change settings via email: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
