phil ringnalda

Please, please, before you publish the third (and there will be a third) version of your iTunes RSS extension, will you please contact either rubys at intertwingly dot net or phil at philringnalda dot com, and let us help you ensure that your spec and the feedvalidator can agree about what you want to say, and that you are saying what you intend to say? Please? I can’t speak for Sam, but I swear that if you will just contact me, and let me help you, I’ll start to follow my mama’s advice, and not say anything if I can’t say something nice about you. I’d contact you directly if I had any idea who you are, but although Tantek apparently does, I’m personally baffled about how to reach you.

I had a quick glance at v2 of your spec, but didn’t look too closely (since Sam’s been writing the validation for it) until someone contacted me about their validation troubles. The initial problem was just a feedvalidator bug from cascading errors, but the solution they hit on was an eyeopener: they switched to the namespace declaration in the v2 spec, and then only got a message saying that they were using the wrong namespace URI. It took me several looks to notice that in the new version, your example declares xmlns:itunes="http://example.com/DTDs/Podcast-1.0.dtd", the sort of minor error we’d be delighted to help you catch by including your draft example from the next version as Expect: !Error and Expect: !Warning testcases.

You’ve stumbled several times now, and we’ve made a fair bit of fun of you, the more so because you show no sign of listening to us, but really we just want the same thing you want, to make it possible for feed producers to provide your users with working feeds. Please, let us help.