FireANT RSS Feed Parsing Problems with Drupal & FeedBurner

People can't subscribe to my vlog feed with FireANT at the moment -- although iTunes seems to work.

UPDATE: This has been fixed now. If you're running into this problem, then check down at the bottom for how to fix it. [Coming soon...]

It seems as though that Drupal may be causing a problem with my Drupal RSS feed for my vlog being sent to FeedBurner, which is causing the FireANT videoblog aggregator to not parse the Feedburner vlog feed correctly.

I'm still not totally sure if it's Drupal or FeedBurner that's causing the problems, but I'm posting more technical details below so that I can ask around in the hopes of trying to debug this issue.

The Drupal RSS feed that I'm sending to Feedburner is the taxonomy term of "vlog." So every post I tag as vlog, gets sent to the feed.

The culprit that seems to be messing up the parsing is this line being added to the RSS feed: "<!DOCTYPE rss>"

When I look at the XML feed, it sends me to Feedburner's page.
http://feeds.feedburner.com/EchoChamberProjectVlog

Daniel Salber tells me that he uses either wget or curl to grab the XML feed directly as text.

Salber sent me a copy of my RSS XML looks like coming from my Feedburner Feed:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE rss>

<rss xmlns:media="http://search.yahoo.com/mrss" xmlns:itunes="http:// www.itunes.com/DTDs/Podcast-1.0.dtd" xmlns:creativeCommons="http:// backend.userland.com/creativeCommonsRssModule" version="2.0" xml:base="http://www.echochamberproject.com">
     <channel>
          <title>Echo Chamber Project - Vlog</title>
         <link>http://www.echochamberproject.com/taxonomy/term/106/0</link>
         <description />
         <language>en</language>
         <copyright>Creative Commons Attribution 2.5</copyright>
...

This Drupal page gives more info defending the use of DOCTYPE.

They link to an article where Jeffery Zeldman says:

Per HTML and XHTML standards, a DOCTYPE (short for “document type declaration”) informs the validator which version of (X)HTML you’re using, and must appear at the very top of every web page. DOCTYPEs are a key component of compliant web pages: your markup and CSS won’t validate without them.

So it seems to have something to do with CSS standards, and with the validation process.

The FireANT folks seem to think that it's unnecessary to include this in a RSS feed, and I think that they may be right because why would a CSS validator have to verify whether or not a RSS feed correctly displays in web browsers? RSS isn't displayed in web browsers.

Oy Vey! Not sure who's right on this one. I'll ask around though.