I have
found the following feed validators to be invaluable in helping me to spot and correct errors in
feeds that I create or read from others:
??? http://feedvalidator.org is an online service, whose software you can also run locally.17
??? http://validator.w3.org/feed/ is a W3C service built from the software available at
http://feedvalidator.org. The syntax checking is available also as a SOAP web service.18
??? For dealing with RSS 1.0, you may find the W3C RDF Validation Service useful (http://
www.w3.org/RDF/Validator/).
Scraping Feeds Using GUI Tools
Feeds are available for many applications??”but by no means for all applications. Because feeds
are so useful, some services have arisen to generate feeds out of unstructured web sites. The goal
of these services is to enable you to construct feeds more easily than you could screen-scrape
the pages yourself??”which, as I discuss in Chapter 2, is an option absent of APIs and feeds. Let??™s
briefly consider one usage scenario to which we will apply two services. (I return to this topic of
feed-scraping in Chapter 11.)
As I mention elsewhere in this book, perhaps the single most useful site on the Web for
tracking web APIs is Programmableweb.com. Currently, it does not have an API and does not
have a feed to represent all the APIs tracked by the site, but there is a feed for the latest changes
in the list of APIs.
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