RSS Framework Continued
Discussion has continued today on the usefulness of a .NET library for handling RSS. Chris described why he thought it was a bad idea and Don agrees with him. I'm probably not experienced enough in design to argue with them but I thought I’d throw my inexperienced two cents out, anyways.
I agree that RSS’s state is very dynamic and the library would need to be updated often, but that is one of the reasons I thought a library would be useful. Since everyone seems to be interested in creating their own aggregators, I have a feeling there will be a lot more personal aggregators (unless someone releases an aggregator everyone likes soon). So, every time something new comes along, everyone would need to change their application to support it. I would much rather download a new library, change a few lines and have my application magically support it.
I spent a huge chunk of my time writing my aggregator trying to figure out why certain feeds would not parse or why certain OPML files would fail. I dont have as much experience with System.XML as I'd like, but it seems to me an RSS library could save a lot of people from having to do quite as much tweaking every time they found a feed that was different or a new standard became available.
But I’m just a college student with only a few years of work experience. Plus, I might be considered biased because I released the code for my library last night.