JoS RSS feed doesn't pass feedvalidator.org

Comments?

I can't subscribe to the JoS RSS feed using RssReader 1.0.57.0, and I'm wondering if there's a correlation here...

Dave Smith
Friday, October 31, 2003

I've been saying this for ages, and I'll say it again, because I think people don't really grok this yet.

*** Generating XML with a templating system is begging for errors, whether that XML is RSS or not. ***

95% of the bad RSS feeds out there are bad because they're being made with string-based template generators instead of proper XML parsers.

Brad Wilson (dotnetguy.techieswithcats.com)
Friday, October 31, 2003

I recently wrote some blog parsing code.  Thinking about your assertion Brad, I am inclined to agree.  Out of the 400 blogs that I parsed, the majority of errors were non-well-formed XML (as opposed to well-formed XML that did not match its schema).

Scot
Friday, October 31, 2003

Of course in XML even strange things can trip you up.

Sam Ruby just discovered that "--" is invalid in XML.

Lou
Friday, October 31, 2003

My rss 0.91 feed doesn't validate there because
"line 3, column 45: Feeds must not contain SYSTEM entities [help]"

The rss 0.91 spec at http://my.netscape.com/publish/formats/rss-spec-0.91.html says this is a required entity.

I don't really know who to believe, and that's why RSS sucks.

Joel Spolsky
Friday, October 31, 2003

Dave, perhaps you could save the rss to your local file system and remove the line that starts with "<!DOCTYPE rss"? Then try to subscribe to it and see if it works?

Joel, I don't know who to believe either, although someone else had the same problem with the syndic8.com validator:

http://www.portalzine.de/XForum-tid2468.html

Scot
Friday, October 31, 2003

ah, but that's the point of Atom isn't it--to have a real thought out standard.

mb
Friday, October 31, 2003

Note that SharpReader consumes the JoS RSS feed just fine.

Mark

Mark Pearce
Saturday, November 1, 2003

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