Invalid RSS - The RSS Blog</title

Thu, 14 Jun 2007 21:53:01 GMT

Of late, I've noticed an up-tic in the amount of invalid RSS being pumped into the Web. In many cases, the invalid RSS is being produced by software engineers that should know better. It's not hard to add a simple SOAP call to your regression tests. Or simply visit the W3C Feed Validator Service during your testing cycle.

http://validator.w3.org/feed/

Who's the culprit of this blog entry. How about reddit and simpy? The simpy feed is simply horrible.

Categories: rss, validation

Reader Comments

Fri, 15 Jun 2007 17:10:30 GMT

User comment

In building some aggregators and web services I have seen this problem a lot. Most often the issue is improper character encoding often as a result of the tool used to publish posts.

I never thought of it being the developers fault. You are right - they should check their feeds before implementing. It's easy to use a simple SOAP call when your application generates the feed.

Sat, 16 Jun 2007 06:15:32 GMT

User comment

I just started added support to Snarfer for simpy's funky date format, only to discover that the date the feedvalidator is seeing is not the same as what I am seeing. It seems their bugs are user-agent dependent (or something like that). I can't help but think it's deliberate - like they're toying with us. How do you screw up that sort of thing accidentally?

- James Holderness

Sun, 17 Jun 2007 21:09:42 GMT

User comment

James,
Judging by how horrible their RSS feed is, I believe they really could screw that up accidentally ;-)

Randy

Sat, 23 Jul 2011 08:52:03 GMT

User comment

axis 2011

Please keep them coming. Greets !This is a in fact good read for me, Must admit that you are human being of the best bloggers I ever saw. Thanks for posting this informative article.