Since last week's post with the latest report on feed reader behaviors, a fair number of things have happened.
First up, I reported that two FreshRSS instances were sending unconditional requests. This turned out to be a pair of interacting bugs, and the developers hopped right on that and stamped it out. Their dev instances shifted right away. That's great.
Then, something funny happened. I wrote that post about the modem noises and it included a MP3 file. The way I do this in my stuff here is that I have some commands baked into my page generator that knows how to create the
I didn't know this at the time, but this immediately triggered strange behavior in a number of feed readers, FreshRSS included. They all started sending the wrong data. That is, they'd get the latest version of the feed with the "2025/03/05/1670" post in it, but on their next poll they'd still be sending the If-Modified-Since and/or If-None-Match values from the previous version.
This sent me down the road of trying to flush out this behavior on the feed score project side of things, but nothing I did would reproduce it. Again, I didn't know that something about that specific post was responsible, so I was groping around in the dark.
Finally, I reported this to the FreshRSS devs, and they came right back and showed me my problem: my feed says it's xhtml, but it was doing something that's not valid:
I hate the web.
How did this happen? Easy: In 2023, I rewrote my generator for these web pages and the feeds. There's now a bunch of code that *tries* to crap out reasonable (and validating) results instead of doing "HTML by printf" like it had been before.
Along the way, I obviously didn't internalize the rule that "in XHTML, attribute minimization is forbidden". It sounds like the kind of thing I would have read once back in the 90s when I was trying to get pages to validate as XHTML 1.0 for some cursed reason, and then promptly forgot. So, it would do a bare "controls" attribute and thought it was fine.
Instagram Engineering
Shopify Engineering