Feed Reading

IE7 Beta 2 Pages

Internet Explorer Beta 2 Preview displays feeds using the built-in feed viewer to provide a lightweight feed reading experience within the browser.

Please use this page to report any pages with feeds that are not rendered properly. Give the feed URL, and the type of error (error page | xml view | etc), like so:

0. http://www.example.com/rss.xml

Issue:
Examples:
IE shows "cannot display this feed" error page
IE does not display title of item correctly.
Strange characters show up in the feed.
etc.

Cause:
Examples:
IE has an issue with feeds of type X
Feed is incorrectly formatted.

Resolution: (fill in "Unknown" here, until we know whether it's fixed by IE or by the server, as appropriate. Once the IE team starts looking at the issue, we'll change it to "Investigating").

1. http://www.andpop.com/rss/andpop.xml

Issue: error page

Cause: RSS 0.91 feed with DTD reference. IE Beta 2 Preview rejects feeds that have DTD references for security reasons. See the discussion of "DTDs are insecure" here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/xmlsdk/html/8a65b5b1-d62a-4b21-b599-4d7fa5b7a8d6.asp

Resolution: Investigating a solution.

2. http://www.csmonitor.com/rss/top.rss

Issue: displays an error page (works in Firefox). Also http://www.csmonitor.com/rss/commentary.rss and http://www.csmonitor.com/rss/scitech.rss display an error page. The other feeds linked to from the site go through FeedBurner, so they display correctly.

Cause: RSS 0.91 feed with DTD reference. See Issue #1 above.

Resolution: Investigating a solution

3. Any feedburner link; for example http://feeds.feedburner.com/BurnThisRSS2

Issue: When opening any feedburner the IE styling takes over, stopping you from subscribing in feedburner or any of their offered options. This is a very very BAD thing to do. Feedburner's XLST presents a bunch of useful options, all of which centre around 3rd party readers. By taking over anything that looks like an RSS feed you appear to not be playing fair, and forcing poor users to use the rather limited IE rss reader.

Cause: IE Beta 2 Preview always shows the IE Feed view, even if the feed includes its own stylesheet.

Resolution: Investigating.

4. http://games.pentarch.org/backend.php

Issue: Error page shown.

Cause: RSS 0.91 feed with DTD reference. See Issue #1 above.

Resolution: Investigating a solution

5. http://www.spiegel.de/schlagzeilen/rss/0,5291,,00.xml

Issue:
Internet Explorer cannot display this feed

		   An unknown error has occurred.

Please try again later.

Cause: RSS 0.91 feed with DTD reference. See Issue #1 above.

Resolution: Investigating a solution

6. http://www.manager-magazin.de/news/rss/0,5796,,00.xml

Internet Explorer cannot display this feed

		   An unknown error has occurred.

Please try again later.

Cause: RSS 0.91 feed with DTD reference. See Issue #1 above.

Resolution: Investigating a solution

7. http://www.theperlreview.com/RSS/tpr-subscribers.rdf

Issue: "This feed format is not supported."

Cause: RSS 0.90 feed.

Resolution: Unknown

8. http://www.heise.de/newsticker/heise.rdf

Issue: xml tree view

Cause: RSS 0.90 feed served as text/xml.

Resolution: Unknown

9. http://www.bibliotheekarnhem.nl/feeds/rssfeed.php

Issue: Error page: "An unknown error has occurred." -- feedvalidator.org gives no errors or warnings. Works correctly in Firefox. This feed has worked on IE7b2p before with different content. Oddly enough, changing the encoding type in the XML prolog from "us-ascii" to "iso8859-1" or "UTF-8" makes the feed display properly, even though there are no non-ASCII characters in the feed.

Cause: Unknown. Feed does not have a DTD. (Issues #1 and #6).

Resolution: Unknown

10. http://vvv.xmb.pri.ee/rss/main.rss

Issue: After subscribing some items disappear. Unsubscribing brings the items back. Feedreader and Sharpreader have no issues with the feed, feed validator at http://rss.scripting.com/ also validates the feed.

Cause: Unknown. IE treats subscribed feeds different from unsubscribed feeds.

Resolution: Unknown

11. http://www.bodybuilding.com/rss/articles

Issue: Valid RSS 2.0 feed generates a DTD feed error in IE 7 Beta 2 (March 20 update). Feed displays just fine in IE 6, Firefox, Sharpreader, Windows Live, etc.

Cause: This feed contains a DTD (Document Type Definition)DTDs are used to define a structure of a webpage. Internet Explorer does not support DTDs in feeds.

Resolution: Unknown

Request: Please enable DTD support in RSS feeds! =)

12. http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/ongoing.atom

Issue: Inline images in feed items do not appear.

Cause: Unknown. Appears it may have something to do with IE being unable to resolve the base URL of the team fortress images.

Resolution: Unknown

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13. In any rdf 1.0 feed -

Issue: Does not display trademark and copyright symbols, instead shows ™ and nothing for ®

Cause:

Resolution:

---

14. http://twit.tv/node/feed, http://thisweekintech.com/

Issue:
IE 7 Beta 2 (7.0.5346.5) shows "cannot display this feed" error page.
IE displays "Feeds with DTDs are not supported" as the title of the page.
Other viewers have no problem with this popular feed.

Cause:

Resolution:

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15. http://www.cbc.ca/podcasting/includes/ideas.xml, http://www.cbc.ca/podcasting/

Issue:
None of the CBC podcasts work. IE7 just renders the raw XML.

Cause:
Looks like it's because the markup contains a big comment (greater than 512 bytes) before the open rss tag. So the sniffing doesn't work.

Resolution:
I've reported it to the owner of these podcasts. Maybe IE's sniffing should look beyond 512 bytes. Also there should be a way of manually adding a feed in IE -- I can't find one.

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16. http://www.distantcreations.com/insidethemagic/inside.xml

Issue: Most recent entries are seemingly ignored by reader. After subscribing, even fewer entries are shown. Viewing raw XML shows all entries.

Cause: Unknown

Resolution: Unknown
marble
---

17. (multiple, e.g. http://dannyayers.com/.rss)

Issue: RSS 1.0 feeds served as "application/rdf+xml" are not handled appropriately.
Quote:
IE7 does not support Content-Type “application/rdf+xml” because there are many RDF files that are not related to feeds. This prevents IE7 from handling RDF files that are meant for other applications.
RSS 1.0 is an RDF/XML format, for which the “application/rdf+xml” type is most appropriate. There is a check being made for the relevant namespace strings, this should be adequate to filter out non-RSS RDF/XML documents.

---

18. http://www.stonecreekchurch.com/templates/System/details.asp?id=24414&PG=xCast&LID=842

Issue: View feeds on this page: failure to interpret ’
Quote:
Internet Explorer cannot display this feed
Reference to undefined entity 'rsquo'.

		 CHIŃSKIE GÓWNO ----

19. http://www.stonecreekchurch.com/templates/System/details.asp?id=24414&PG=xCast&LID=842

Issue:
Open the example page, then click on the 'View feeds' button.
IE shows a 'Feed code error':
"Internet Explorer cannot display this feed
Reference to undefined entity 'rsquo'."

Still an issue with the release version of IE.

Cause: Unknown

Resolution: Unknown"

20. http://cctv.icode.co.uk/feedlist.xml

Issue:
The URL mentioned is NOT an RSS feed yet IE
incorrectly "Guesses" the URL is an RSS feed then
complains when it doesn't recognise it with:

Internet Explorer cannot display this feed
Internet Explorer does not support this feed format.

Also still an issue with the release version of IE.

Cause: Incorrect guesswork

Resolution: Don't guess based on URL..
Last edited by Tom Green

21. http://www.thepropertymanager.com.au/rss.xml

Issue:

Internet Explorer cannot display this feed
This feed download was interrupted.

This feed doesn't work in ie7. Just started happening about 2 weeks ago.
Funny thing is if I save the xml file as a static file and re-upload it works in ie7.
Even stranger is that if I load a feed of a specific broker
(eg: http://www.thepropertymanager.com.au/rss/userId/103 )
these load fine in ie7. Even though the files are essentially identical format (just different content).

Cause: Unknown

Resolution: Unknown

Last edited by Nick Buick - 16.Feb.2008