Dear Google: Please fix your mobile reader XML

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)

Thursday, June 7th, 2007 atom, google, rss, xml

2 Comments to Dear Google: Please fix your mobile reader XML

Sorry about this bug, it has been fixed.

Mihai Parparita
Google Reader Engineer

Mihai Parparita on June 8th, 2007

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?)

aehso on June 10th, 2007

What I'm Doing...

@ubfid Bigger banks are too expensive to bailout/capitalize relative to our GDP. See http://url.ie/xco (Irish GDP inflated by multi-nats!) 1 hr ago
Weird, Jeff Stelling (brilliant Sky Sports 'Gillette Soccer Saturday' anchor) is to be the new Countdown host. He might be good... 12 hrs ago
Merging Irish banks until only BOI & AIB exist is terrible idea. Their assets are too expensive to be 'saved' if required(>100% of I ... 16 hrs ago
I've got a ticket for the Pumas game tomorrow...can't wait! 19 hrs ago
@donncha OO now has a native OS X build of v3. Latest neooffice is still cut from OO v2 source still I think so it's probably a bit behind. 19 hrs ago
More updates...