pf » Yahoo Pipes Generates Invalid RSS Feeds

February 22, 2007

Yahoo Pipes Generates Invalid RSS Feeds

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 run a 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!

Permalink | Add Comment |

add to del.icio.us | Tags: rss, atom, feeds, yahoo, pipes, foundeo, validation

Related Entries

Foundeo's 2007 End of the Year Sale - December 21, 2007
Google Sitemaps Accepts RSS and Atom Feeds - September 12, 2005
8 Ways to Save Bandwidth on your RSS Feed - July 12, 2007
Trick or Treat - Web 2.0 Goodies for ColdFusion - October 31, 2006
Zookoda For Sale - September 22, 2006

12 people found this page useful, what do you think?

Trackbacks

Trackback Address: 627/C9FF4B66D1521D1E64E5CCD1645E8457

Comments

On 02/22/2007 at 5:43:33 PM MST Brian Rinaldi wrote:

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.

On 04/25/2007 at 7:32:20 AM MDT bughunterjerry wrote:

Good. You're a good programmer and a good QA engineer also. I refer your article in my blog. http://bughunterjerry.wordpress.com

On 04/28/2007 at 1:39:36 PM MDT Johnny wrote:

What software do you use for your regression testing?

On 06/01/2007 at 11:30:27 AM MDT ray wrote:

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???