One of the really cool things about this latest web boom (I think I shall coin it web 2.0 (-; ) is RSS feeds. Granted they have been around much longer than all of this new stuff, but they have really started maturing over the last two years or so. The ability for any jackass, such as myself, to create a flickr or youtube account and subscribe to that data is totally awesome.

To take it one step further, we can also take sed RSS feed and pull it into our own blogs/sites. Kind of like the homepage of this site. What one sees is the parsing of three RSS feeds, one for del.icio.us, flickr, and last.fm.

I added those on there because I wanted all the time I spend doing other things on the web to reflect on my blog. Yet, in doing so, I ALMOST had to sacrifice something else that was very important to me. Standards.

The first issue I dealt with was the RSS feed for flickr. For some reason it isn’t looked at as valid markup. I had to run it through a feedburner account to pull it into my blog and not break my site. In the end it was a good solution as I now have big brother tracking on everyone that subscribes to my photos. And to be honest, I think it is just Magpie RSS that is pinging the feed to update it. I can’t imagine subscribing to someone’s photos unless…perhaps I was stalking them.

The second issue was with my del.icio.us feed. This is a perpetual problem and something I have to take extra steps to avoid. I use Firefox and I have the del.icio.us tag extension installed. It’s way too easy to tag a site and add it to my growing list of bookmarks. The problem lies within the sites I tag and their title tags. For some reason people throw funky characters into their tags. Why can’t they change their ways to suit me???? (-; Anyhow, when I bookmark something, I am on the lookout for renegade characters that break my validation.

I really only had those two issues in regards to feeds, yet I have another one that has been a thorn in my side for building blogs. That thorn is YouTube embed code. Now don’t get me wrong, I love YouTube and have been sucked in plenty of times surfing between clips. But their code they are passing to the millions of users to post on blogs and myspace breaks validation. I could care less about MySpace (67 html validation errors on my page) but YouTube I expect more from.

In all honesty there is more to the problem than just YouTube. It’s flash, it’s validation, it’s Internet Explorer, and on and on. In the end I cannot build a blog for a client that is completely standards compliant if they want to paste in YouTube code. It’s already a stretch with them entering in their own content.

What’s the point to this rant? James Hall is the point. James Hall is the solution.

For anyone else who wants their site standards compliant AND wants YouTube, a solution is out there.

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Update: To illustrate another case of external content breaking my validation, Lupe Fiasco coming in through last.fm has a problem. Looks like I am going to have to stop listening to that album.

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