Dead People Don't Validate
In some kind of mordant fit, I decided to add the Dead People Server RSS feed to the Lifestyle section of my free RSS Web Viewer application. This RSS feed displays news about celebrities and other "interesting people" that have recently died. (You can use the links to navigate to the Dead People Server to go back further in time and discover whether that minor celebrity of yore is alive or dead, so it really covers more than recent deaths)
When I opened my RSS Viewer with the new (dead) feed added and clicked the HTML link next to the feed, the feed was displayed but with an erroneous second date (December 31, 1969) for posting next to every entry. In Unix-speak and PHP, the language I wrote the page in, December 31, 1969 is the last day in the previous epoch to ours, and on Jan 1, 1970 a new epoch was born. (We are still in it.)
Running the Dead People Server RSS feed through the feed validator at FeedValidator.org, I found several validation issues involved the dates associated with entries in the feed. So I guess that's the moral: Dead men don't have to wear plaid or validate. The feed is still funny (IMHO) even if it does print this strange, pre-epochal date along with each entry (so I left the feed on my RSS Viewer)!
P.S. I emailed the Dead People Server, and they fixed their feed so that it validates, and it now displays right on my site. A happy ending, not a dead end!
Posted by Harold Davis at February 24, 2005 03:39 PM
