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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.
I would've seen this post sooner, but my RSS feed was broken... something about a 404?
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.
According to an article on DeviceForge.com quite a few RSS feeds around the probably web stopped working properly over the past few weeks because Netscape recently stopped hosting the critical rss-0.91.dtd file.
STOP, Grammar time. Ooooh whoooaaa oh oh...
Probably someone over at netscape.com simply thought he was cleaning up some insignificant cruft."
Or Netscape got tired of people using their bandwidth. Regardless of the reasons: if you reference a file on someone's site, it's hardly their fault if they move/change/delete it, and it breaks your stuff.
Please help metamoderate.
"A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn't even know existed can render your own computer unusable."
And if so, why would anyone rely on AOL to make something on the web work?
http://bgcommonsense.blogspot.com
Suck that, Web 2.0!
This is the precise reason why I host everything myself including my own series of tubes, dubbed the Internets. I host not only every file that my site uses, but I also have a program that regularly crawls the entire Internet and compresses it onto my own distributed system. That way I can browse the Internet by myself without worrying if someone else's system will fail. Although I do need to replace systems every now and then. But that's not a problem, b/c the distributed system has 3-5 copies of the Internet, each copy in a different place. Wait, isn't their some other company that does that? I can't quite place the name.
Seriously though, relying on some other system so your site will work is a recipe for disaster. It's similar to relying on someone to take you to work everyday. After a while, you get used to that fact that someone else is driving you that you don't even think about it. Then your driver gets deleted somehow. And you're stuck with no way to work.
Funny createSig(Witty remark, Odd reference)
{
return (Funny)remark + (Funny)reference;
}
It is expected that DTDs are hotlinked. For example, if you ever look at html source of a web page, you would see: 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.
I once had a signature.
This could seriously affect both of the guys using Netscape.
Fetching the spec is idiotic.
First of all, that's a needless operation. It can take time; don't forget the DNS lookup and all.
Second of all, it's not as if you could handle any random DTD. Software doesn't work that way. (this is one of the reasons why XML itself is a mostly-lame idea) If the XML doesn't match expectations, you can't convert it to your own internal representation. You probably have a C struct that you need to fill in. Even in some wild interpreted language like perl, you just won't have any use for unexpected data structures and you damn well need the expected data structures.
From April 2001, "Netscape removed the RSS 0.91 DTD from their website. This means that all RSS feeds which depend on the RSS 0.91 (many, MANY news sites) cannot be used with a validating parser."
/. discussion (which, um, I haven't read) remains.
It seems as though it just took them 5+ years to follow up on the threat? Primary links are broken, but of course the lively
my.netscape.com is undergoing a redesign, and when we announced the redesign about 10 days ago, the DNS entry for my.netscape.com was changed to point to the new server where My Netscape will be living. This had the effect of making anything under the old my.netscape.com unavailable, since the only thing public on the new server is a splash page. (Nobody on the team was especially aware of this DTD file since all of the old Netscape employees were let go last year around the time Netscape.com was redeveloped; anybody working at Netscape now was hired since then.)
Now, why this file was living under my.netscape.com is anybody's guess, but we'll have it restored ASAP. I only wish that someone had brought it to our attention so that I didn't have to find out about it from Slashdot.
Christopher Finke
Netscape Developer
If I would create a reader that was dependent on version 0.91 of the distribution, it sure as hell would include the DTD in local storage. It makes no sense to create a reader that can also use, say, version 0.92 since you would not know what had changed (and there is no such thing as inheritence between versions of a DTD afaik). Actually, as other readers noted, it would be terribly stupid to make your web-server or client rely on a third party computer for which you cannot guarantee the uptime.
These URL's are mainly there for their Uniqueness, not so much as for a place of quaranteed storage. Of course, they are also a nice place to look for the actual definition, but after that you would need a local repository. This is the first thing an XML library should support, and the first thing a moderately intelligent programmer should look at. I get *very* annoyed if this kind of basic rules are ignored. And I've even seen them ignored by people pointing to the XML digital signature definitions, where security and reliability should be the first requirements in the design.
Also, what would happen if w3c.org or netscape.com go the way of the Gopher? If they go bust? It's a quickly changing world out there.
You make several good points that I want to respond to more fully, but I've got to run out, so I'll have to do that later. In the meantime, I'll put this out there: my e-mail address is chris@newnetscape.com; my screenname and other contact information is available at my website. Anyone who wishes to do so can contact me regarding issues with any of the Netscape websites or the Netscape browser; if I can't solve your problem, I can definitely get you connected with the right person.