Jordan Planet and IE7
A couple of weeks ago, we got a very interesting email from the “Contact Us” in Jordan Planet site:
Topic : RSS Feed issue with IE7
Message : I’m a Program Manager for RSS on the Internet Explorer team. I’m contacting you because we have received a report that your website’s RSS feed is not compatible with Internet Explorer 7, and we’d like your cooperation in resolving this issue.
The feed in question is: http://www.jordanplanet.net/rss20.xmlOn investigating, we discovered that your feed contains a reference to a DTD (Document Type Definition) used to help XML parsers with validation of the document. However, DTD validation is a potential source of a security issues for XML parsers, and they are not required for RSS feeds, so Internet Explorer’s parser rejects all feeds that contain references to DTDs.
The DTD reference is not necessary for your feed to work in either Internet Explorer or any other aggregator. To enable users to subscribe to your feed in Internet Explorer 7, simply remove the reference to the DTD.
Please feel free to contact me about this.
Now, I was surprised that anyone from Microsoft would bother to check or send me a report about the feed of Jordan Planet.. So, in appreciation of thier time, I spent some time researching about it. I didn’t find any mention of that “security issue”. It seems that all Drupal-based sites (including the popular news site The Onion which uses Drupal as well) have this DOCTYPE/DTD declaration in their feeds.. So, basically, IE7 (according to the Program Manager for RSS in IE7) won’t work with Drupal feeds :)
As non-sense as this seems to me, I removed the DOCTYPE/DTD declaration from JP feeds.. I might return it soon though, as thinking more about it, the feed is XML/RSS valid, and it doesn’t make sense that IE7 completely ignore the feed just because it have a DOCTYPE/DTD declaration. They can just ignore checking the DTD they are very worried about security.
On another note: 59.9% of Jordan Planet visitors use IE, 22.1% Firefox 1.5, 7% Firefox 1.0, 3% Mozilla 5.0..
I have no idea why people still use IE, i’ve i’ve posted about it in my blog and talked about this issue repetitivly urging people to stop using IE for many reasons, when will they ever see the light and switch to FireFox?
w bil3arabi?
Gooo Firefox :P
Gooo Opera ;-)
Booo FF
Booo IE
:-D
halirious! now Micro$oft care about security issues hehe
I’ve been trying to connect my site through IE7 feed but it wasn’t working for the last 2 days! Now it seems that your post answered my concern as am using Drupal as the content management system for my site!
This should be fixed in the latest version of Drupal. http://drupal.org/node/41165
Hi Isam,
I saw that you work on Arabic Wikipedia. I live in Florida a few miles away from Wikipedia headquarters.
Hell !! most of people here try to HIDE THE SUN with their small hands !!
people: IE is the most widely used browser on planet earth, not only on planet jordan, so, architects, software engineers, doctors, proram managers, SDET Engineers, All can’t be wrong and YOU are true !!
boys/girls, as a promise by Bill Gates, Microsoft will update IE every 6 months for issues concerning security !!