The Lurker

Improved RSS feed

posted by ajf on 2003-04-14 at 12:30 pm

I've added the content of my blog entries to the item elements in my RSS feed (which is now using RSS 2.0 instead of RSS 1.0), using xhtml:body (not the icky content:encoded which was the only way to include HTML in RSS which was usefully supported in RSS readers). I'm currently looking for something to read RSS with which supports xhtml:body, so I can make sure my feed doesn't break again.

I didn't have much luck testing my feed against the RSS validator:

Sorry

An error occurred while trying to validate this feed.

Possible causes:

The address may be incorrect. Make sure the address is spelled correctly. Try loading the feed directly in your browser to make sure an RSS feed exists at that address.

The feed may be temporarily unavailable. The server may be down, or too slow. Try again later.

The validator may be busted. If the feed exists, the server is fine, and the problem is reproducible, send an email to rss-validator@diveintomark.org with details of the problem.

I don't want to know about possible causes. I want to know the specific cause of my error!

(It's probably the second one; lurking.org's hosting company's upstream provider has been having a lot of trouble lately.)

Fortunately you can download the validator, which claims that there are no errors in my RSS at the moment. It doesn't appear to check for relative URLs in the HTML content (which is not unreasonable; I'm pretty sure it hasn't been updated for the use of xhtml:body anyway, and even if it had, it's still a lot to ask). Relative URLs are not permitted in RSS, apparently because nobody seems sure what base URL should be used to resolve them (ie, whether it should be the RSS feed's URL, or the URL in the channel's link element). Why they can't pick one, or add something to the channel or item element unambiguously indicating which one is to be used, is beyond me.