XML Validation

[Lou]

What I'm really looking for is checking my Sitemap.xml and RSS.xml files using CSE Validator.
I found the RSS feed validator at http://www.feedvalidator.org/ it has the disadvantage of needing to upload the file before checking it. That approach doesn't excite me. I don't find anything for a sitemap.

When I press F6 I get "[nsgmls] no document type declaration; will parse without validation" and I can't find a DTD to make it happy.

The use of an auto-generating tool seems like over kill sense I am only on News Letter #5 and plan one more this summer. The news letters have 4-7 articles I want to put in or add to the sitemap and RSS feed. The problem of course is I type like that Dodge invisible monkey.

Any suggestions? I'm sure I've missed some resource on the web.

[MikeGale]

I haven't looked at this in a long time so I've forgotten what I knew. I'm interested so I made a quick web search.

A brief look at FeedValidator http://feedvalidator.org/about.html indicates that the source is open (Python code) and distributed with test cases (which is a huge plus). If you're comfortable with that it wouldn't be hard to set up testing on your development machine. That would give you RSS etc.

Better still you might like a general XML validator and give it a schema to use. For Sitemaps you could try the tool at http://www.xmlvalidation.com/ and pass in a schema like http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd. I didn't test this so you'll need to give it a spin to find how it currently works. (I believe the Schema reference can be in the sitemap or passed in via the web interface.) You should also be able to validate feeds with the tool.

(If you're happy with a little coding this could be automated using the URI.)

The major frameworks, .NET, Java... have classes that can be used to validate XML against a schema. (Process XML against Schema and look at the exceptions generated!) I have a faint memory of only getting one exception at a time when I used this once. (Hopefully there's an easy way to do better than that.) So it might be bit clunky.