inessential by Brent Simmons

User focus, NetNewsWire, and Atom

In a comment to a previous post, Scott Palmer suggested that I’m wrong about being strict with Atom parsing. Scott wrote, “The key is not the code, the key is the customer. You have a GREAT user focus, please keep it.”

My reply was that I’m being strict because of my user focus.

Here’s my new slogan: Don’t let bad feeds punish good users.

Every minute I spend making my Atom parser more forgiving of not-well-formed XML is a minute taken away from working on features people are asking for, things like searching and synching and everything else.

If there are some bad feeds out there—and there will be, no matter what—it’s not fair to NetNewsWire users if I spend time dealing with these feeds.

And if NetNewsWire is strict, it may make it more likely that Atom feed producers will produce good XML, which is good for NetNewsWire users.