If it ain't broke, maybe you still need to ‘fix’ it.

Whilst running the blog's Atom feed through a feed validator, I discovered that I may have been unwittingly causing people problems by … using sane XML for the feed.

Having dutifully associated the Atom namespace with the atom: prefix that all appropriate tags had been given, it turns out that this is more than many aggregators understand, despite being barely above entry-level XML syntax. So, I've moved to the alternative ‘switch default namespaces as necessary’ approach, which is a bit like moving to a friend's house just so that you can say ‘home’ rather than ‘your place’.

Fortunately other people also feel this is an unsatisfying state of affairs, and there's a project already in place that identifies the offenders (which sadly include Safari and Thunderbird) and the standards-compliant tools (such as Firefox and IE7).

If you've been having problems with the Atom feed for this blog in the past, hopefully all should now work. Why not drop a line to your aggregator's developers and see if you can't get it fixed for all the others too?