In the post Feeds and well-formed XML Sean Lyndersay of the IE RSS team writes

Our years of experience in with HTML in Internet Explorer have taught us the long-term pain that results from being too liberal with what you accept from others. Hence, we’ve adopted the following overriding principle for IE 7 and RSS platform in Windows Vista: 

 We will only support feeds that are well-formed XML.

This principle allows us to build a more predictable feed parser. As a platform, it's important that applications using the platform to consume feeds can rely on the fact that the platform will always be providing information in the way that the publisher intended (trying to guess what a publisher meant to do when there is an error in a feed can be tricky, at best). We also spoke to several people in the RSS and developer community at Gnomedex and at PDC, and they wholeheartedly supported this.

Hell Yeah!!!


 

Friday, 04 November 2005 19:19:16 (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
This is great news for feed readers that follow Postel's law: be liberal in what you accept. I'm surprised Microsoft hasn't learned its lesson with IE which has historically been very liberal. Being strict sounds nice but sux.
pwb
Saturday, 05 November 2005 00:58:44 (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
well-formed, but not valid I suppose. Most of the problem feeds I see are well-formed but not valid, e.g. Drupal sites by default specify a wrong DTD.
Saturday, 05 November 2005 12:34:48 (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
good ... now can you get the ie people to stop making assumptions about text/plain documents and surreptiously converting them to text/html when they deem appropriate ... i don't need them to try reading my mind. if i send a text/plain content-type header, that's what i mean.
philippe
Sunday, 06 November 2005 10:55:42 (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
Great! Great! Great!
Right decision.
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