Pete Freitag Pete Freitag

Yahoo Pipes Generates Invalid RSS Feeds

Published on February 22, 2007
By Pete Freitag
coldfusionweb

I was doing some regression testing today on foundeo's feed parser for ColdFusion today, and when I saw some posts today on Yahoo Pipes, so I thought I'd add one of their RSS feeds to my test harness.

When I ran the test I found that the dates were not parsing correctly. After a closer look at their RSS 2.0 feed I noticed that they are formatting dates using ISO 8601 (for example: 2007-02-22T20:06:31.0-00:00).

I know what your thinking: An RSS 2.0 feed using an ISO 8601! Everyone knows RSS 2.0 uses RFC 822 for formatting dates (eg: Thu, 22 Feb 2007 20:06:31 GMT)! ISO 8601 is used in Atom and RSS 1.0 feeds. Ok, you probably weren't thinking that, but if you had been messing with RSS feeds today you might have.

A quick test on feedvalidator.org will confirm that RFC 822 is required for RSS 2.0. It's just a little suprising that Yahoo didn't do that before launching this awesome service!



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Yahoo Pipes Generates Invalid RSS Feeds was first published on February 22, 2007.

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Comments

Interesting note, though I didn't have any problem adding the feed to my reader(s). You should, however, submit a bug since this is technically a beta.
by Brian Rinaldi on 02/22/2007 at 5:43:33 PM UTC
What software do you use for your regression testing?
by Johnny on 04/28/2007 at 1:39:36 PM UTC
On the subject of rss and pipes; I created a couple of pipes just to see what it was all about but when I subscribe to the feed I get the posts with all the html. What did I miss???
by ray on 06/01/2007 at 11:30:27 AM UTC