…please learn about well formed URLs. And if it’s really too hard for you to figure out, I would be happy to come over and help for a Finals ticket or two

What’s the problem?

I’m a nba fan and I subscribe to the NBA.com RSS feed (http://www.nba.com/rss/nba_rss.xml) which works fine most of the time but sometimes I get an empty page. Why? Because some lazy developer thought it might be a good idea to add ?rss=true to every link.

If you look at todays feed you can find this item:

<item>
<title><![CDATA[Cavs' Gibson Expected to Miss Four to Six Weeks]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://sports.espn.go.com/nba/news/story?id=3255778?rss=true]]></link>
<description>…>
</item>


If I follow the link ESPN returns:

<!-- obj null -->


The suffix ?rss=true appears after every link in the feed so I’m pretty certain it’s not ESPN’s fault…

Update:

It’s even better. Not only do they destroy external links by appending ?rss=true, they kill their own links, too:

<link><![CDATA[http://my.nba.com/thread.jspa?threadID=300025597?rss=true]]></link>