: What are the disadvantages of an invalid RSS feed I have recently started using feedvalidator.org to validate my RSS feeds. The RSS reader reads the feeds fine but the feed validator says they

@Looi9037786

Feeds are a way to syndicate your content in a (more) machine readable way. So if your feed is invalid, those machines may not be able to parse it. Might as well not have built them in the first place then.

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@Barnes591

Very simply, the disadvantage is that some particularly strict feed readers might refuse to process your feed if it's not valid. I don't know any specific feed readers that do that.

If you want to fix your feed, you'll have to look at the specific error messages given by the feed validator. For example, the feed from nytimes.com occasionally uses an (X)HTML tag (<em>) inside a <media:description> tag, when the schema doesn't allow for random tags being used there. Ways of working around that are stripping (X)HTML tags from your feed content or marking those kinds of fields as pure text by using <![CDATA[ ]]> sections. That latter solution is a bit ugly, though, and technically feed readers shouldn't magically render it as (X)HTML, either.

As far as I know (but I'm not really an expert on this stuff), there is no convenient and proper solution for this.

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