Blogger outputting bad Atom feeds with invalid MIME types
This is annoying me enough that I have to post. Mostly so I can rank for the terms related to this problem, because I’ve tried searching for references to it and no-one else seems to have noticed the problem! At Feed Digest, however, it’s impossible to avoid as customers are complaining their feeds aren’t being processed properly.. but the reason is that Blogger.com has fscked up a lot of its customers feeds.
The problem seems to be that they’re throwing random crap into the “type” attribute, which is meant to be used for MIME types.. like so:
<link rel=’related’ type=’How to setup a 301 Redirect’ href=’http://www.dailyblogtips.com/how-to-setup-a-301-redirect/’></link>
“How to setup a 301 Redirect” is not a valid MIME type, so it’s not a valid Atom feed.
Another problem is that they’re not encoding apostrophes in many places, so the code is becoming totally invalid in the eyes of XML parsers. Check this out:
<link rel=’related’ type=’53 CSS-Techniques You Couldn’t Live Without | Smashing Magazine’ href=’http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/01/19/53-css-techniques-you-couldnt-live-without/’></link>
Blogger have decided to use single quotes for text encapsulation, which would be okay if they didn’t also allow apostrophes in the attribute data unescaped! The apostrophe on “Couldn’t” totally freaks out XML parsers.
(Update.. they’re also mixing single and double quotes..
<link rel=’alternate” type=”text/html” href=”http://www.cocc-blogs.com/2007/01/tutorial-on-installing-gaim.html”></link>
Check out the rel attribute.)
(Update 2.. I have word from Google that they’re looking into the problem. Result!)
