dive into mark

Bill Kearney of Syndic8 has convinced me that the default Movable Type template for RSS 1.0 is wrong. Where it says this:

<channel rdf:about="<$MTBlogURL$>">
<title><$MTBlogName encode_xml="1"$></title>
<link><$MTBlogURL$></link>
<description><$MTBlogDescription encode_xml="1"$></description>
<language>en-us</language>
<webMaster></webMaster>
<lastBuildDate><MTEntries lastn="1"><$MTEntryDate format="%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S"$><$MTBlogTimezone$></MTEntries></lastBuildDate>
<pubDate><$MTDate format="%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S"$><$MTBlogTimezone$></pubDate>
<admin:generatorAgent rdf:resource="MovableType/<$MTVersion$>" />

It should actually be this:

<channel rdf:about="<$MTBlogURL$>">
<title><$MTBlogName encode_xml="1"$></title>
<link><$MTBlogURL$></link>
<description><$MTBlogDescription encode_xml="1"$></description>
<dc:language>en-us</dc:language>
<dc:date><MTEntries lastn="1"><$MTEntryDate format="%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S"$><$MTBlogTimezone$></MTEntries></dc:date>
<admin:generatorAgent rdf:resource="http://www.movabletype.org/?v=<$MTVersion$>" />

I have updated my RSS templates accordingly, and Ben and Mena have been contacted and asked to make this change to the default templates.

This is all made more difficult by the fact that there doesn’t appear to be an online validator for RSS 1.0, in the spirit of the W3C (X)HTML validator. There are many parsers, including some that will output pretty graphs, but none that will catch this sort of error. As my father the economics professor would say, this is a market opportunity.

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