Common Feed Errors
An analysis of a week’s work of click-throughs on Feed Validator [help] links
- MissingGuid (1726)
- RSS has an identity crisis.
- SAXError (653)
- People are bozos. They make all kinds of errors.
- UndefinedElement (629)
- Yes, it really is pubDate with a capital D. And no, itunes:category can’t be placed at the item level.
- UnexpectedContentType (536)
- Why are WordPress feeds served as text/html?
- EncodingMismatch (519)
- XML on the Web Has Failed. Buy the t-shirt.
- InvalidRFC2822Date (461)
- The single most error prone format on the planet. Evar.
- HttpError (303)
- If I can’t get to it, I can’t validate it. Capisce?
- ObsoleteNamespace (235)
- What? Atom 1.0 has been out for a full three months now, and your free hosting provider hasn’t yet upgraded? Try FeedBurner.
- ImageLinkDoesntMatch (206)
- I’m still not sure why this is a problem.
- UnicodeError (171)
- If all you are doing is strcpy’ing your html page into your feed, do us all a favor and add the following line at the top.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
Thanks.
- DuplicateDescriptionSemantics (136)
- Funky!
- InvalidFullLink (135)
- If only xml had provided a standard way to declare the base for a given URI…
- InvalidContact(120)
- People don’t seem to want to reveal their email addresses. Perhaps they should be told about Dublin Core?
- NotHtml (120)
- Silent Data Loss.
- UnexpectedAttribute (105)
- Yes, it really is spelled isPermaLink with a capital P and a capital L.
- ContainsHTML (96)
- Some people really want to put markup in their titles.
- BadCharacters (85)
- Generally this means that there are some evil quote characters smarting off again.
- SecurityRisk (84)
- Beware of the platypus.
- MissingDescription (78)
- Some people don’t seem to want to provide both a title and a description for their feed.
- MissingAttribute (78)
- If you are going to include an enclosure element, you might want to put the url in there too. I’m just saying…
- ContainsRelRef (76)
- People seem to want to put relative URI references in their descriptions too.
- DuplicateValue (69)
- What part of globally unique do you not understand?
- MissingItunesElement (65)
- If you are going to submit your podcasts to iTunes, you really should include a category, a language, and indicate whether or not the podcast is “explicit”. Think of the children.
- UndefinedNamedEntity (60)
- I don’t care if XHTML defines them in their DTD, DTD’s have not been a part of RSS since the summer of 2000.
- NotInANamespace (58)
- RSS 2.0 does not permit extensions to define child elements unless those child elements are also in a namespace.