Mobile app version of vmapp.org
Login or Join
Cofer257

: 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

@Cofer257

Posted in: #Rss

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 are not valid feeds. I tried other RSS feeds like
feeds.nytimes.com/nyt/rss/HomePage http://feeds.latimes.com/latimes/news feeds.ign.com/ignfeeds/all/

All of these feeds are invalid according to feed validator. But, these are nytimes, latimes and ign we are talking about. Are they not considered about an invalid RSS feed? I tried searching for disadvantages of an invalid RSS feed but couldn't find much.

Thanks,
KA

10.02% popularity Vote Up Vote Down


Login to follow query

More posts by @Cofer257

2 Comments

Sorted by latest first Latest Oldest Best

 

@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.

10% popularity Vote Up Vote Down


 

@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.

10% popularity Vote Up Vote Down


Back to top | Use Dark Theme