As I write the iTunes DTD (which is required to strictly validate any RSS feed that refers to it) is broken. Instead of returning the DTD

http://www.itunes.com/DTDs/Podcast-1.0.dtd

is redirecting to the iTunes home page. The DTD is typically used for podcast feeds.

It’s all a bit rubbish. If you publish a DTD it’s pretty important that you make sure it’s always available. At least if it was returning a 404 Not Found error validating XML parsers would be likely to report the correct problem; at the moment the ones I’ve tried are reporting that the user’s RSS is malformed.

Presumably by the time you read this it’ll be fixed.

Update: It turns out that this isn’t actually ‘broken’ behaviour; according to w3c.org

The namespace name, to serve its intended purpose, should have the characteristics of uniqueness and persistence. It is not a goal that it be directly usable for retrieval of a schema (if any exists).

So it’s validators that rely on the namespace name being a URI that are broken. I’ve just given myself a crash course in XML namespaces; it seems this issue has been the subject of a heated debate which I managed to miss in its entirety. Still, now I know all about XML namespaces :)

This entry was posted on Monday, November 7th, 2005 at 9:53 pm and is filed under Apple. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.