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Article Idea: Processing XML in the Real World

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Coincidentally just as I finished reading a post by Tim Bray about Private Syndication, I got two bug reports filed almost simultaneously about RSS Bandit's support for secure RSS feeds. The first was SSL challenge for non-root certs where the user complained that instead of prompting the user when there is a problem with an SSL certificate like browsers do we simply fail. One could argue that this is the right thing to do especially when you have folks like Tim Bray suggesting that bank transactions and medical records should be flowing through RSS. However given the precedent set by web browsers we'll probably be changing our behavior. The second bug was that RSS Bandit doesn't support cookies. Many services use cookies to track authenticated users as well as provide individual views tailored to a user. Although there are a number of folks who tend to consider cookies a privacy issue, most popular websites use them and they are mostly harmless. I'll likely fix this bug in the next couple of weeks.  

These bug reports in combination with a couple more issues I've had to deal with while writing  code to process RSS feeds in RSS Bandit has givn me my inspiration for my next Extreme XML column. I suspect there's a lot of mileage that can be obtained from an article that dives deep into the various issues one deals with while processing XML on the Web (DTDs, proxies, cookies, SSL, unexpected markup, etc) which uses RSS as the concrete example. Any of the readers of my column care to comment on whether they'd like to see such an article and if so what they'd want to see covered?

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