Dear Google: Please fix your mobile reader XML
June 7th, 2007
This should be an easy one for Google to fix but it’s still borken. Since the weekend, Google Mobile Reader on Opera/N800 is failing to render the home page with the following error:
XML parsing failed: xml processing instruction not at start of external entity (Line: 5, Character: 0)
The offending page content reads as follows:
<!-- Content-type: Preventing XSRF in IE. --> <?xml version="1.0" ?> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//WAPFORUM//DTD XHTML Mobile 1.0//EN" "http://www.wapforum.org/DTD/xhtml-mobile10.dtd"><html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><head><itle>Google Reader</title> <meta http-equiv="content-Type" content="application/xhtml+xml; charset=UTF-8" /> <style type="text/css"> ...
Err, why is there a comment before the XML declaration? If this is supposed to be valid XML it shouldn’t be there. I’m surprised the various other mobile platforms are forgiving enough to ignore this (or is it borken on them too and nobody has noticed?). Please Google, fix your XML.
(discussion ongoing here)
Sorry about this bug, it has been fixed.
Mihai Parparita
Google Reader Engineer
Great Mihai, might be good to stick a test into whatever system test harness you use for your web apps (?) to verify the XML remains valid. (I would have thought that’d be system test no. 1, no?)