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May 30, 2007

YouTube RSS feeds don't validate

I noticed that YouTube has recently included a <enclosure /> element in their RSS 2.0 feeds which contains "duration" attribute to hold duration (in seconds) of the video. As per RSS 2.0 spec, there is no duration attribute for <enclosure />, however, "length" is a required attribute, which is also missing.

No big deal, lots of feeds are broken on the planet and it is not a topic to be blogged like this. But my point is, we don't expect such things from Google/YouTube, they must be using some tool to validate their feeds as their QA process?

I use Feed Validator for feed (ATOM, RSS etc) validation. Thanks to Mark Pilgrim, Sam Ruby et-al for making it.

You can also see what feedvalidator reports about YouTube's feed.

BTW! I got happy for a moment when I saw duration in their feeds, I have to use YouTube API to get it.

Posted by Abdul Qabiz at May 30, 2007 07:46 PM

Comments

Just another proprietary extension.

Posted by: आशीष at May 30, 2007 09:10 PM

Thanks for the report. I filed a bug (internally) with the YouTube team.

Posted by: Gregor J. Rothfuss at June 4, 2007 11:05 AM

@Gregor: Thanks

-abdul

Posted by: Abdul Qabiz at June 4, 2007 03:23 PM

This has been fixed and should be live soon.

Posted by: Gregor J. Rothfuss at August 2, 2007 06:45 AM

Hi Abdul,

The current RSS feeds will not be changing, but the next iteration of the API will be based on GData. (http://code.google.com/apis/gdata) These feeds will validate and should address your concern.

Thanks :)

Steph

Posted by: Stephanie at August 4, 2007 07:11 AM

@Steph: Thanks for update...

-abdul

Posted by: Abdul Qabiz at August 20, 2007 11:12 PM

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