One More Step Forward?
Tim Bray: I’m going to have to go back and patch up the code so it doesn’t emit any of those nasty colons and relative URI references that apparently hurt implementors’ fragile feelings.
As Tim continues to update his post with more and more aggregators that already do support these features, I’m gaining hope that some day I can retire the following Feed Vaidator message: Avoid Namespace Prefix. Initial testing indicates that Firefox and IE (and presumably, therefore, Thunderbird and all tools based on the Windows RSS Platform) are both in the “good” column here. Unfortunately, it looks like Opera isn’t. Furthermore, at least one of the tools in the “bad” column already has a fix in beta, and at least one other tool doesn’t have the namespace prefix problem. Those that wish to do so are welcome to reference the tests mentioned on the XML Namespace Conformance Tests wiki page, and are invited to update that page with up-to-date results.
With the potential retirement of that one warning message comes the need for another: Relative href value on self link. Note that this message only occurs if the self link is relative and there is no absolute xml:base attribute value on either the link element or the enclosing feed element. Tim’s ongoing feed, for example, continues to validate with no warnings.