Netscape Dumps Critical File, Breaks RSS 0.9 Feeds

An anonymous reader writes "In the standard definition of RSS 0.91, there are a couple of lines referring to 'DOCTYPE' and referencing a 'dtd' spec hosted on Netscape's website. According to an article on DeviceForge.com quite a few RSS feeds around the web probably stopped working properly over the past few weeks because Netscape recently stopped hosting the critical rss-0.91.dtd file. Probably someone over at netscape.com simply thought he was cleaning up some insignificant cruft." Some explanation has been offered by a Netscape employee.

Comments

Why would this break RSS readers?

[eurleif]

I don't see how this would break RSS readers. DTDs pretty much never get read except by validators. Normal SGML and XML parsers just treat the DTD URL as an opaque string, not as something that can be retrieved.

DTDs are different

[pikine]

A DTD (document type definition) is a file that describes how an SGML document is structured. In this case, the DTD that went missing defines RSS 0.91, which is used by Navigator 4 for "channel" subscription.

It is expected that DTDs are hotlinked. For example, if you ever look at html source of a web page, you would see:

<!DOCTYPE ...>

on the top, and the hotlink goes to somewhere on w3.org. That is because W3 is the authority body that defines the html.

Since Netscape is the authority body that defines RSS 0.91, it is a bit strange how they stopped hosting the definition.

In any case, the missing definition won't affect software that processes RSS feeds. It only affects software that checks whether a SGML document is structured properly according to that missing DTD.

The main interest to this article seems to be the speculation how a deprecated web 1.0 company could end up hiring a clueless webmaster who deletes important files without recognizing its importance.