Anything special about RSS feeds in website ?

[Marc Baaden <baaden@smplinux.de>]

Hi,

I was experimenting with RSS feeds, trying to incorporate them in a db website
structure, by simply adapting the example rss.xml. But I run into strange
results.

If I don't get an error, I just get "empty" content (eg no feed data). I have
verified that downloading the RSS url does indeed show available content. Maybe
the problem is with my xsl processing instruction ? That would look like

SGML_CATALOG_FILES=/etc/sgml/catalog xsltproc --catalogs --maxdepth 999 \
--output rss.html  --stringparam output-root .  mytabsite.xsl  rss.xml

On some RSS feeds (eg <rss feed="http://nwalsh.com/rss/whatsnew.xml"/>)
I get the error

Error Undefined namespace prefix
xmlXPathCompiledEval: evaluation failed

What does that mean ?

And another error:
http://abclocal.go.com/wpvi/news/xmlnews.xml:373: error: xmlParseEntityRef: expecting ';'
<title>Iraq R&R: Soldiers Receive Break</title>
                ^
RSS Failed: http://abclocal.go.com/wpvi/news/xmlnews.xml

Is than RSS version conflict ?


Also some sites provide RSS and RDF xml data. How should one proceed in such
a case ?

Sorry for that many questions, but the learning curve is steep and I haven't yet
found any compelling documentation.

Cheers,
  Marc Baaden