Normalization and MashZone NextGen Support for RSS/Atom Formats

MashZone NextGen no longer normalizes syndicated feed results to a single standard format and version, as it did in earlier releases. MashZone NextGen administrators can change configuration to enable normalization if needed. Or MashZone NextGen developers can request normalization for a specific invocation of a web feed using MashZone NextGen Headers/Parameters.

Although normalization can make using information from syndicated feeds easier, there are limitations:

Syndicated feeds in Atom formats cannot be normalized to the RSS format and vice versa.

If you need normalization and also need syndicated feeds in both RSS and Atom formats, you can normalize to the RSS format and publish feeds that use the Atom format as REST web services instead. Or, normalize to Atom and publish RSS feeds as REST web services.

Some syndicated feeds extend the standard format to include additional information, such as GEORSS which includes geographical location data. In these cases, normalization may remove extension information that you want.

With normalization enabled, you can publish feeds that use GEORSS or other extended syndication formats as REST web services. Or you can disable normalization (set the normalization type to native).

Syndicated responses in languages other than English may be scrambled by normalization. The character encoding is affected in some cases, making the responses unreadable. In this case, the solution is to leave normalization disabled.