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Netscape Restores RSS DTD, Until July

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the that's-kinda-lame dept.

Randall Bennett writes "RSS 0.91's DTD has been restored to it's rightful location on my.netscape.com, but it'll only stay there till July 1st, 2007. Then, Netscape will remove the DTD, which is loaded four million times each day. Devs, start your caching engines."

3 of 134 comments (clear)

  1. Re:mirror ;) by geoffspear · · Score: 5, Informative

    Great, the entire internet community can rely on one random person's server instead of on one really big corporation's server. That should fix things.

    --
    Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
  2. Re:I don't get it by jrumney · · Score: 5, Informative

    Developers use off the shelf XML parsers, which generally take care of validation for you. Netscape created this problem themselves when they stated in the spec for RSS 0.91 that well-formedness was not enough, RSS 0.91 feeds should be validated against the DTD. They then specified that document authors must use a PUBLIC doctype specifier, so the option of using a SYSTEM one (where the DTD is looked up in a local catalog) is not an option.

  3. "Caching" not the answer by KrisWithAK · · Score: 5, Informative

    As I replied for the previous Netscape RSS DTD article http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=216818&cid=176 03480, caching DTDs from the network is not the answer if there is the possibility they will not be there in the future:

    The proper thing to do is for your application to use an XML catalog for resolving entities/URIs and bundle the DTD files with the application. There is a good article at http://xml.apache.org/commons/components/resolver/ resolver-article.html that helped me out. In addition, if you are using Eclipse with the web tools platform, you can customize the catalog so it resolves DTDs and entities locally. See http://wiki.eclipse.org/index.php/Using_the_XML_Ca talog.