Itunes podcasting DTD?

December 8, 2005 11:59 AM

What happened to www.itunes.com and the podcasting XML DTD that used to be hosted there?

Recently I launched a podcast of a monthly radio show that I do. When I was updating it this week with the latest show, I found that my XML didn't validate anymore. That led me to discover that

http://www.itunes.com/DTDs/Podcast-1.0.dtd

... doesn't result in the DTD anymore. It seems that all traffic to http://www.itunes.com/anything is forwarded to http://www.apple.com/itunes .

Upon Googling, I expected to see a zilliondy people bitching about this, but generally it's like nothing's happened. Does Apple know that they screwed up? Is there another DTD that I'm supposed to use?

posted by intermod to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)

Looks like someone just screwed up. Their web page still says to use that address.

No one else validates, that's why no one noticed.
posted by smackfu at 12:20 PM on December 8, 2005

Response by poster: I'd expect to see this kind of thing (brief stupid online mistakes, like prematurely publishing an obit) for a few minutes, or at most a few hours, but I think this has been broken for weeks. Isn't podcasting the Next Big Thing? Doesn't this affect a whole lot of people? Won't someone think of the children?
posted by intermod at 1:40 PM on December 8, 2005

Notice that the sample RSS feed uses example.com for that URL, which is also quite wrong.
posted by smackfu at 2:11 PM on December 8, 2005

CaSe MattErs! Those folks at Apple changed DTDs to dtds so try:

http://www.itunes.com/dtds/podcast-1.0.dtd

If you're working on an RSS feed, don't forget to check it using:

http://feedvalidator.org/
posted by raster at 3:14 PM on December 8, 2005

Response by poster: Did you try it? It forwards to www.apple.com/itunes as described in the original post.

And yes, feedvalidator good, that's how I came across this problem in the first place, as described in the original post.
posted by intermod at 6:17 PM on December 8, 2005

The RSS support in iTunes is an absolute mess. If you have a flick through the syndication-dev mailing list you'll see that they're very much making it up as they go along. Sam Ruby (who runs feedvalidator.org) had a very tough time trying to extract concrete information about the iTunes RSS extensions.
posted by cillit bang at 6:49 PM on December 8, 2005

Also, RSS and Atom are not validating (in the DTD sense) formats, so the DTD doesn't have to exist for your feed to validate. You should just use the lowercase version for the namespace name and forget about the DTD.

Here's the latest version of the spec.

(Yes, it exists only as a mailing list post. See what I meant by mess?)
posted by cillit bang at 6:58 PM on December 8, 2005

Response by poster: Thanks guys. I've made the case changes and will just drop it for a while, and revisit when I do the update next month. FYI, the radio show is here.

Speaking of formerly competent high tech companies [ducks] I've been having real trouble with Earthlink lately. Grumble grumble ....
posted by intermod at 8:25 PM on December 8, 2005