RSS "FEED Validator" Bombs

Published Wed, Apr 14 2004 23:56 | coad

ARG!  After spending so much time making sure my RSS feeds are valid XML, I have run into a limitation of the seemingly most preeminent RSS feed validator online.

 

It bombs out right at about 200K.  If the feed is longer, it is invalid.  There is no warning that this limitation is reached.

 

FEED Validator by Mark Pilgrim and Sam Ruby

http://feedvalidator.org/

 

You can attempt to validate my feed, but if it is over 200K (which it currently is), it will fail. 

Validate RSS Feed

 

However, you can attempt to parse the feed as XML, as in my C# example code, and it will parse just fine.

Assimilate XML RSS Feed from URL

 

Since validating my RSS feed with the copy/pasting from Word has been such a major issue, I added a main link to validate the RSS feed via “FEED Validator”.  This link has been removed.

 

Update: Previously the mentioned limit was about 400K, it is actually closer to 200K.  This is due to reporting error with U8-DOS encoding in UltraEdit.

 

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Comments

# coad said on April 15, 2004 5:32 AM:

I agree that the error message should be clearer, but may I ask why you are generating a feed that is over 400K? You realize that feeds are made to be downloaded over and over again, right? What could you possibly be syndicating that is worth downloading a 400K feed over and over again for a few changes?

FWIW, the average feed size is about 10-15K.

# coad said on April 15, 2004 10:40 AM:

Mark, your FEED Validator tool is a very useful program, thank you for making this available to the online community.

After several hours of trying to fix the RSS XML (due to Microsoft Word's copy/paste problem), it was frustrating to find out that the tool was reaching a limit without notification. I'm new to blogging and am trying to learn some best practices and have been very actively working on balancing all these elements.

Microsoft Word is embedding tons of seemingly unnecessary tags that are bloating the feed. I'm working on trying to find or create tools to clean this up. It is a process. I would very much like to get it down to around the average of 10-15K and agree that 400K is ridiculous for just a few posts.

# coad said on May 27, 2004 1:08 PM:

The validator tool has been fixed! It will now tell you if the feed is over its limit. Thanks Mark.

# coad said on February 25, 2005 12:53 AM:

got here looking for 'rss feed validator' because feedvalidator.org seems to down temporarily.

how would any tags inserted by msword be acceptable other than those permitted by the specs/convention?

anyhooooo, very picky this rss thing. imagine not being able to validate because the xml tag is not the very first line even though it is the very first non blank line. a robust parser, not the validator, should be able to skip forward over whitespace until it encounters the first required line.

how do i know this? asp puts in a crlf for every break in the enclosing code tags. i won't type them here because i want to avoid causing any problems, but you know i mean the percent sign and angle bracket thing. so you have to run them together on the same line, and that's just butt ugly code formatting.