Blogging Roller

OK, I've got the latest IE7 build, the one Microsoft is handing out at MIX06. It took me a bit longer than I had expected to change my examples to compile with the new Feeds API included in the new build. They changed the Feeds namespace to Microsoft.Feeds.Interop and made a bunch of other little changes. So all I have for you tonight is one little example of weirdness.

Let's say you have a feed that uses the RSS 2.0 <description> element to hold a short summary of each item and the funky <content:encoded> element to hold the full content of each item (just like Dave Winer's Wordpress feed does). When the Feeds API reads your feed, it converts it to a normalized (but currently not valid, due to some bugs) form of RSS 2.0 that uses a mix of RSS and Atom 1.0 elements. For funky RSS elements, it uses Atom. So you end up with something like this:

Item contains


Feed API normalizes to

The old switcharoo, eh?

Here's a more complete example: a source feed in RSS 2.0 format and the same feed in Feeds API normalized normalized format. I've also got an Atom example: source and normalized.

That's pretty weird alright, but they're on the right track. They're using Atom elements to model RSS. Now, if they'd just follow that line of thinking to it's logical conclusion and use Atom as the normalized feed format, they might actually be able to please the assholes and protect the morons of this world.

Tags: topic:[rss], topic:[atom], topic:[feeds], topic:[ie7], topic:[vista], topic:[mix06]

* The title of this post refers to the FeedsManager.Normalize() method which takes an Atom 0.3, Atom 1.0, RSS 1.0 or RSS 2.0 feed and normalizes it to Feeds API RSS 2.0 format. To be clear about this, I'm using this little C# program to get at the normalized feeds:

using System;
using System.Xml;
using System.IO;
using Microsoft.Feeds.Interop;
namespace BlogApps_Chapter06 {
   class Normalize {
      static void Main(string[] args) {
         string url = args[0];
         FeedsManager fm = new FeedsManagerClass();
         IFeedFolder rootFolder = (IFeedFolder)fm.RootFolder;
         IFeed feed = null;
         if (!fm.IsSubscribed(url)) {
            feed = (IFeed)rootFolder.CreateFeed(url, url);
         } else {
            feed = (IFeed)fm.GetFeedByUrl(url);
         }
         feed.Download();
         string xml = feed.Xml(feed.itemCount,
            FEEDS_XML_SORT_PROPERTY.FXSP_PUBDATE,
            FEEDS_XML_SORT_ORDER.FXSD_ASCENDING,
            FEEDS_XML_FILTER_FLAGS.FXFF_ALL,
            FEEDS_XML_INCLUDE_FLAGS.FXIF_CF_EXTENSIONS);
         StreamWriter sw = new StreamWriter(File.OpenWrite(args[1]));
         sw.Write(xml);
         sw.Close();
      }
   }

}