the movable type import format
In a previous life, I was trying to import content from a Movable Type blog into Hayfever. Then I wanted to write an importer from Hayfever into Wordpress. And wow the MT import format is nasty. Things that have annoyed me, in no particular order:
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There's no charset considerations in the spec. I care deeply about explicit charsets nowadays. I'm sure the implementation does something with them, but what?
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The DATE atom is an annoying US date, with no timezone information.
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The whole serialization format is just nasty. The Wordpress importer, for instance, splits records on '––—nAUTHOR:', which is presumably much more reliable (in the case that there are lines of '-' in the data), but is a fairly nasty assumption that bit me quite badly for my own importer.
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The PING and COMMENT atoms seem to contain nested sets of atoms, but this isn't indicated in any sort of general way - you just have to know that PING is special.
I'm just grouchy, I guess.