Open Letter to the Google Blogger Team

March 27, 2006

@ 07:09 PM

Thanks to numerous reports from RSS Bandit users it has come to my attention that the Atom feeds provided by Google's Blogger are invalid and in many cases aren't even well-formed XML. Please fix this. I'm tired of dealing with threads like Blogspot feeds - XML Failure in our support forums.

If you'd like an example of what is wrong with your feeds. Click on http://feedvalidator.org/check?url=http://nothing-more.blogspot.com/atom.xml which shows the results of validating the feed for Derek Denny-Brown's blog. Below is the list of errors returned

This feed does not validate.
line 4, column 0: This feed uses an obsolete namespace [help]
<feed xmlns="http://purl.org/atom/ns#" version="0.3" xml:lang="en-US">
line 4, column 0: Unexpected version attribute on feed element [help]
<feed xmlns="http://purl.org/atom/ns#" version="0.3" xml:lang="en-US">
line 7, column 0: type attribute must be "text", "html", or "xhtml" [help]
<title mode="escaped" type="text/html">only this, and nothing more</title>
line 7, column 0: Unexpected mode attribute on title element (7 occurrences) [help]
<title mode="escaped" type="text/html">only this, and nothing more</title>
line 8, column 0: Undefined feed element: tagline [help]
<tagline mode="escaped" type="text/html">irregular eccentic eclecticisms, di ...
line 11, column 0: Undefined feed element: modified [help]
<modified>2006-03-27T00:01:47Z</modified>
line 12, column 0: Unexpected url attribute on generator element [help]
<generator url="http://www.blogger.com/" version="5.15">Blogger</generator>
line 13, column 0: Undefined feed element: info [help]
<info mode="xml" type="text/html">
line 4, column 0: Missing feed element: updated [help]
<feed xmlns="http://purl.org/atom/ns#" version="0.3" xml:lang="en-US">
line 22, column 0: Undefined entry element: issued (6 occurrences) [help]
<issued>2006-03-26T15:25:00-08:00</issued>
line 23, column 0: Undefined entry element: modified (6 occurrences) [help]
<modified>2006-03-27T00:01:47Z</modified>
line 24, column 0: Undefined entry element: created (6 occurrences) [help]
<created>2006-03-27T00:01:47Z</created>
line 27, column 0: type attribute must be "text", "html", or "xhtml" (6 occurrences) [help]
<title mode="escaped" type="text/html">You call that Democracy?</title>
line 36, column 0: Missing entry element: updated (5 occurrences) [help]
</entry>
line 153, column 156: XML parsing error: <unknown>:153:156: unbound prefix [help]
... S-X's niceties. If I knew people on the <st1:place st="on">Vista</st1:pl ...
                                             ^
In addition, this feed has issues that may cause problems for some users. We recommend fixing these issues.
line 5, column 134: service.post is not a registered link relationship (2 occurrences) [help]
... hing more" type="application/atom+xml"/>
                                             ^
line 7, column 66: text/html type used for a document fragment [help]
<title mode="escaped" type="text/html">only this, and nothing more</title>
                                                                  ^
line 4, column 0: Missing atom:link with rel="self" [help]
<feed xmlns="http://purl.org/atom/ns#" version="0.3" xml:lang="en-US">
line 18, column 150: service.edit is not a registered link relationship (6 occurrences) [help]
... emocracy?" type="application/atom+xml"/>
                                             ^
line 27, column 63: text/html type used for a document fragment (6 occurrences) [help]
<title mode="escaped" type="text/html">You call that Democracy?</title>
                                                               ^
line 29, column 0: application/xhtml+xml type used for a document fragment (6 occurrences) [help]
<div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">