Another point: it is shocking how many feeds have errors in them. I analyzed the feeds of some of the top contributors on HN, and almost all had something wrong with them.

Even RSS wizards would benefit from looking at a human-readable version instead of raw XML.

I ended up writing a feed analyzer that you can try on your feed: https://www.rss.style/feed-analyzer.html

> I analyzed the feeds of some of the top contributors on HN, and almost all had something wrong with them.

I’m sceptical about your analysis, because your tool makes spurious complaints about my feed <https://chrismorgan.info/feed.xml> which show that it’s not parsing XML correctly. For stupid reasons¹ that I decided not to fix or work around, slashes are mostly encoded as &#x2F;, which is perfectly valid, but your tool fails to decode the entities inside attribute values. I don’t know what dodgy parser you’re using, it’s possible this is the only thing it gets wrong about parsing XML, but it doesn’t instil confidence. I would expect a strict XML parser to be more reliable. I’ve literally only once encountered a feed that was invalid XML². Liberal parsing is not a virtue, it’s fragile in a different way. Postel was wrong.

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¹ I wish OWASP’s XSS protection cheat sheet had never been written. I will say no more.

² WordPress thinks it’s okay to encode U+0003 as &#x03; in an XML 1.0 document.