RSS Advisory Board

RSS Validator

Message

'type/subtype' media type is not specific enough

Explanation

The web server is reporting an MIME type that is not specific enough for consumers to consistently identify it as a a feed. Although we tried to parse it as a feed, aggregators may well report this as an error and act as if the user had pointed them at something other than a feed.

Solution

RSS feeds should be served as application/rss+xml. Atom feeds should use application/atom+xml.

  • For static content served with Apache, use the AddType directive.
  • For static content served with Microsoft IIS, add a MIME type.
  • Other information can be found here or in the documentation provided by your server.

If this is not possible, make sure that one of the following set of markers is present in the first 512 bytes of your feed:

  • <rss
  • <feed
  • <rdf:RDF AND http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns# AND http://purl.org/rss/1.0/

For more information see:

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