Broken aggregator

I read the contents of several hundred sites each day through my news aggregator. I’ve switched aggregators a few times over the last few years, starting with a home-grown web-based aggregator, followed by Radio, Amphetadesk, then Radio again, back to Amphetadesk, and currently Aggie. If the site doesn’t have a news feed, I either create one through a small scraping tool I built, or don’t bother to read it.

All the aggregators I’ve tried have a serious flaw. They let feed developers break the aggregator display. A single unclosed <em> tag causes all the posts from all the sites from that point on to be italicized. That’s something that I can generally live with, but it’s possible for those unclosed tags to compound (or would that be to aggregate?) and make a mess of my display.

Today, one feed forgot to close an <em>, another forgot to close a <b> and another forgot to close a <small>. What I ended up with was tiny, bold, italicized text that’s next to impossible to read.

The problem could have been worse. If someone forgot to add the > to the end of a tag, the rest of the text on the page might be ignored, at least until a closing angle bracket occured.

But much worse, it’s possible for a feed developer to inject malicious code into their feed, and most aggregators would happily render the HTML to the browser. A bit of clever JavaScript in a feed that exploits a browser’s vulnerability to cross site scripting attacks could do quite a bit of damage.

I suggest that the various aggregator developers take steps to eliminate these problems. Check for unclosed tags and close them. Strip things like script tags from the feed before rendering them.