Re: [syndication] referencing a DTD

[Julian Bond <julian_bond@voidstar.com>]

In article <4.3.1.0.20011114100239.019f2810@127.0.0.1>, Rod Davies
<rdavies@orientpacific.com> writes
>As many would know, when Netscape reorganized their site 12 months back, 
>they mistakenly deleted their RSS DTD, meaning many publishers with RSS 
>feeds referencing this suddenly and without warning had problems. Netscape 
>restored it very smartly after complaints, and stated that it was a mistake.
>
>My question is, seeing Netscape does not have as much interest in RSS as 
>previously is there another DTD we could use, which would be more 
>permanent? Could anybody suggest some?
>
>We are not programmers or developers, just publishers, which might be very 
>evident! We use 0.91

Arguably, you don't need a DTD and many feeds don't reference one. The
only piece you might need is a reference to an entity encoding list.
Even this can avoided by double encoding all entities (eg < becomes
&amp;lt;).

A typical entity encoding for RSS 0.9x might look like this at the top
of the RSS file.
<!DOCTYPE rss [<!ENTITY % HTMLlat1 PUBLIC "-//W3C//ENTITIES Latin 1 for
XHTML//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml-lat1.ent";>
%HTMLlat1;]>
 
This references a file at the http://www.w3.org which is less likely to
disappear than the netscape one.

As another alternative, you can take a copy of the netscape file and
host it yourself. 

But I'm no XML expert. Perhaps somebody could comment from the point of
view of producing "good" XML.

-- 
Julian Bond    email: julian_bond@voidstar.com
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