Re: DOCTYPE issues with RSS feed.

On Fri, Jul 23, 2010 at 11:36 AM, websrvr
<websrvr@macftphttp.serverbox.org> wrote:
> Nothing more frustrating than trying to solve a problem and only
> finding useless information and thousands of other people who are in
> the same boat.
> I tried to validate my RSS feed and I get the "No DOCTYPE found!
> Checking XML syntax only" message like so many others.

The validator is designed to validate HTML and a selection of XML
dialects (listed in the "Document Type" select box), plus any document
that specifies a machine-readable schema to validate against. Lacking
a known dialect or schema it cannot validate the document, but it can
check XML well-formedness. The message simply informs you that is all
it's doing.

RSS 1.0 is not among the dialects known to the validator.

It does not have a machine-readable schema:

http://web.resource.org/rss/1.0/spec

So you cannot fix this "problem" by adding a doctype declaration
referencing a machine-readable schema.

Other tools are aware of RSS 1.0 and can provide guidance about
potential problems with your document beyond ill-formedness:

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

http://feedvalidator.org/

The validator homepage does mention this:

"If you wish to validate specific content such as RSS/Atom feeds or
CSS stylesheets, MobileOK content, or to find broken links, there are
other validators and tools available."

But it might be better if the UI assumed people didn't read or
understand the message, and provided appropriate hints if a input
document looks like a feed.

--
Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis

Received on Monday, 26 July 2010 06:25:46 UTC