458965 - net-news-global.de - RSS feed with <guid> that's not the permaLink it claims to be

Status: RESOLVED INACTIVE

(Web Compatibility :: Site Reports, defect, P5)

Description

[Maximilian Mehnert]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.3) Gecko/2008092416 Firefox/3.0.3
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.1b1pre) Gecko/20081006 Shredder/3.0b1pre

In the feed linked to above, the content of <guid/> and <link/> is slighly different with only <link/> really providing a link to the website of the <item/>.

E. g.:
<link>http://www.metimes.com/Opinion/2008/10/07/in_defense_of_radical_behavior_is_muslim_fundamentalism_a_threat_to_the_west/2904/</link>

and

<guid>http://www.metimes.com/Opinion/2008/10/07/in_defense_of_radical_behavior_is_muslim_fundamentalism_a_threat_to_the_west/2904/_1223415595</guid>


Apparently, thunderbird tries to load content from the URL in <guid/> which does not work.


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. subscribe to feed mentioned
2. try read content 
Actual Results:  
server error

Expected Results:  
content

Comment 1

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

That's why I love RSS like a brother: the sort of truly evil brother whose only purpose in life is to make your life miserable.

You're seeing that because of the (correct) change made in bug 327378 - the feed is in error, an error that the poorly-written spec led it to, by saying "isPermaLink is optional, its default value is true" when it meant "isPermaLink is optional, unless it is present with a value of 'false' the guid is a permalink to the item." The first two places I cross-checked us with, Google Reader and Bloglines (who between them had a hefty majority of the market share last time I checked), both agree and use the (broken) URLs from <guid>.

If the site wants to use not-a-URLs in their <guid>, they need to use <guid isPermaLink="false"> instead.

Comment 2

[Maximilian Mehnert]

Thanks a lot! I've forwarded this.

Comment 3

[Maximilian Mehnert]

Still, if isPermaLink="false", the "website" link in thunderbird shows the guid - although the content is loaded correctly from <link>.

Comment 4

[Maximilian Mehnert]

Sorry, correcting myself: Setting isPermaLink="false" does not work at all as expected.
<guid> is still used.

Comment 5

[Maximilian Mehnert]

*sigh* everything works correctly. Consider myself sleep-deprived ;-)

Comment 6

[Rene Marth]

There are more (big) sites that provide RSS Feeds with this combination of non-URL guid with a link that contains the URL:

http://www.sportal.de/rss/sportal.rss
http://www.stern.de/standard/rss.php?channel=all

From my view it would be better to do some fallback to workaround those buggy feeds.

Comment 7

[Chris Lawson (gone)]

Comment 6 isn't a TE issue, and comment 5 indicates this is FIXED, so if comment 6 needs to be addressed, it needs to be addressed at the Thunderbird level.

Comment 8

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

No, comment 5 indicates that if people do what I say, things will work, rather than that people actually _have_ done what I say. At the moment, the first item in the feed is the busted <guid>http://guineaoye.wordpress.com/2009/12/07/guinea-oil-and-gas-concession-hyperdynamics-signs-agreements-with-repsol-and-dana-petroleum/_1260214022</guid>, which would work perfectly as a <guid isPermaLink="false">.

Comment 9

[Chris Lawson (gone)]

Then confirm this already :-p

Comment 10

[Karl Dubost💡 :karlcow]

The issue still exists.
The Guid and the link have different references.

Comment 11

[Karl Dubost💡 :karlcow]

Nobody is taking care of this.
https://validator.w3.org/feed/check.cgi?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.net-news-global.de%2Frss%2Frssfeed.xml
The support for RSS in Firefox has been reduced to its minima.