Invalid RSS feedAn RSS feed is an XML document with an implicit DTD. Unlike XHTML, this DTD doesn’t specify any named character entities so the only ones allowed are &, ', ", <, and >. This means that feed generators, like the one in WordPress and other blog & content management systems should convert any other character entities into numeric form before serving the feed document. WordPress 1.5, at least, doesn’t.
As a result, the feed received by the reader may generate a syntax error. In practice, most don’t seem to notice entities in the description text and pass them straight through for rendering but some, including Feedreader, choke if there are any in the title.
Conclusion—don’t use named entities in your blog titles.
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Nice Rick… your topic ‘Invalid RSS feed’ is in fact actually… well, an invalid feed. Was that deliberate? On the same topic the XML/RSS button (at the top) for West Penwith Resources needs some tender loving care, I wasn’t able to get either of my RSS toys to play with it.
No not trying to be clever with this posting (but it is too old now to test it with Thunderbird reader).
Yes, you seem to be right about http://west-penwith.org.uk/wpenwith.rss , it doesn’t read in Thunderbird, it just says “Not a Valid RSS feed” yet (now I have fixed some things) it validates at the Feed Validator site and works ok with Feedreader but still not with Thunderbird.
It is possible it is not getting the right HTTP headers but I have set .htaccess to treat it with “AddType application/rss+xml rss”, perhaps my server is ignoring this.
I have tried to force this to fail, but can’t I have just added both this and the main wpenwith.rss feeds to Thunderbird and have no problems. I am using TB version 1.5(build 20051201) downloaded today, could it be that Mozilla have made some changes to fix the issues at their end?
Right, thanks – that is the same version as mine. You have given me a clue clue, though. I had to remove the feed and re-connect it. and then it was ok. I will send you some others that fail to connect by email.