Pick a format any format
So it seems everyone is saying it now, christ, people are even meta saying it pick one feed format and stick with it. All the aggregators worth their salt support all of them so it really doesn’t matter. I know when I add a feed to Bloglines I hate it when I get presented with 4 versions of the same thing just delivered to a different specification.
As the old ironic adage goes ‘the great thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from’. Having just reimplemented The Humor Archives Feed using Rome I fully sympathise with Sam, Nick and Dion’s position. My first implementation of a feed simply cranked out RSS 2.0 directly using JDOM, however with Rome one is encouraged to use an abstraction to populate the feed and then specify the feed type. Once this is done the specific feed specification compliant XML is cranked out to a Writer. This is all very good, however, it takes the minimal subset approach, so for example on an RSS 2.0 Feed type it is impossible without going to the specific implementation to set the TTL field as it isn’t a minimal subset feature of feeds.
I looked at using just the RSS 2.0 beans within the Rome framework but couldn’t see any obvious way to write it to an output stream or writer - I only look briefly however, if anyone knows please let me know. As I only want RSS 2.0 perhaps Rome isn’t for me.