Re: RSS feed validator

Hello,

Cf. message from Gerard Kanters, Thu, 6 Feb 2014 11:08:30

> With the W3C feed validator http://validator.w3.org/feed/ has an issuei
> with the <enclosure> tag
> If that contains a file which is https:// instead of http:// it will
> fail and provides this error:
>
> url must be a full URL:
>
> If I rewrite the URL to http:// it will pass.
>
> I would either recommend the RSS standard to support https or fix the
> validator.  I'd like your opinion on this.


I have a - more or less - similar issue when validating <enclosure> items.

My RSS feed has been validating correctly for years, and validation recently
broke after I changed my site domain name :-(

Former name was e-artefact.eu, and the URLs "http://e-artefact.eu/xxxxxxxx"
passed the validation.

The new name is artefact.photos (I've registered one of the new ICANN-era
generic TLD), and the new URLs "http://artefact.photos/xxxxxx" are no
longer recognized; the validator writes the same message as for Gerard :
url must be a full URL

Too bad. I'm almost sure it's a problem with the domain name extension,
because I did a simple test, rebuilding my RSS file with a fancy site name,
artefact.photos.com. This name doesn't exist but the extension .com is one
of the historical TLD.
And this modified feed validates Ok !

Seems that the validator does URL checks, using an obsolete list of domain
names extensions.

I agree with Gerard Kanters on the fact that the validator should probably
be fixed :
1. By doing only syntactic checks on URLs, verifying they are well formed,
    <protocol>://<domain>/pathname...
2. Or by checking validity of URLs domains via DNS lookups ?

Nothing but my opinion...

(As for now, my fix is to remove from my web pages the RSS validation icon,
because as my feeds are correct (and work perfectly with my new domain)
I don't want my visitors to click and see unapropriate errors messages.

Best regards,
Jean-François