Simmons Consulting, the Website of Toby Simmons

Apple iTunes XML DTD gone missing

02
Jan

If you try to load your iTunes library into an XML parser, you are probably going to get an error because Apple, in their infinite wisdom, has seen fit to remove the DTD from their web server. If you try to load http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd you get a 404, Page Not Found. Um, Apple, could you please put it back?

Update: (9:50 p.m., 2007-01-02) If you add the two lines:

  1. xmldoc.validateOnParse = false;
  2. xmldoc.resolveExternals = false;

before loading the XML, it will ignore the missing DTD.

Comments (3) »

  1. Dan says:

    Just noticed this as well. My Java SAX parser is now broken. I filed a bug at https://bugreport.apple.com

    Maybe if enough of us file bug reports, Apple will notice.

  2. DanS says:

    Hi Toby,
    Thank you for posting this. I took a cached version of the DTD file copied it to a text file and put it on our webserver under DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd I then changed our hosts file to point http://www.apple.com to our webserver and voila…our parser worked again.

  3. Toby Simmons says:

    Yeah, I thought about doing that but my script runs on the local machine (not just on a web server), and I didn’t want to screw up DNS for real visits to Apple’s web site. Good job, though!

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