NewsGator Craziness

Adrian Sutton

Why is it that Tim Bray’s perfectly correct Atom feed is being converted into broken RSS2 by the time it goes through NewsGator and comes out in NetNewsWire?  The reason I ask is that whenever Tim posts photos in a blog entry they wind up returning 404s from his direct feed, but work perfectly when they come through Planet Intertwingly.  It’s crazy.

The actual feed content contains (excerpted):

<feed
xml:base='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/ongoing.atom'
…
<entry xml:base='When/200x/2009/01/22/'>
…
<img src="PS082906.png" alt="Fog" />

When I view the XML source in NetNewsWire though, it’s been corrupted into an RSS2 feed and the image tag is now:

&lt;img src="http://www.tbray.org/PS082906.png" alt="fog" /&gt;

I can understand NewsGator messing up the slightly more complex than normal usage of xml:base (despite it being a very annoying bug), but why on earth would it convert everything to an RSS2 feed?