Standards Skirmish

Hope springs eternal around here, and I thought, "If my students are too busy to check the course webpage every now and then, maybe they'll benefit from having it syndicated." And so I went to work trying to write a site feed for my calculus webpage. (Either that or else I thought that fussing about on the computer was more interesting than any of the other tasks that I have to do. Take your pick.)

I've tried writing it both in RSS 2.0 and Atom. I'm not really happy with either.

First off, Firefox dislikes both of them (as I currently have them written), making this seem like less and less of a good idea. Firefox hates my Atom feed more than my RSS feed. Conversely, Safari likes my Atom feed and merely tolerates RSS 2.0. To make the RSS 2.0 work how I wanted to, I had to kludge in some stuff that I cribbed from elsewhere, making it a less elegant solution. However, I'm really unhappy with Atom's requirement that every entry has to have an id and that the ids need to conform to some complicated scheme.

Now I need to figure out which format I should bother fighting with -- just in case my students would want to subscribe to the latest updates about math class.