Netscape Dumps Critical File, Breaks RSS 0.9 Feeds

Posted by ryuzaki0 on Sunday January 14, 2007 @03:28AM from the hate-when-that-happens dept.

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.

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Why would this break RSS readers? by eurleif · 2007-01-14 03:32 · Score: 5, Interesting

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.