I’m locking into creating a podcast feed, already discovered PSP-1-Podcast-RSS-Specification and also this gist. It declares several XML namespaces:

  • xmlns:googleplay="http://www.google.com/schemas/play-podcasts/1.0"
  • xmlns:itunes="http://www.itunes.com/dtds/podcast-1.0.dtd"
  • xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"
  • xmlns:rawvoice="http://www.rawvoice.com/rawvoiceRssModule/"
  • xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/"

But the last one (content) is not used.

Why would someone do this? Maybe some single mistake?

Here are three random podcast feeds (i don’t know about the quality of the podcast, I’m just here for their XML):

All three of them have unused XML namespaces. Is this good for anything? Do their software provide additional data the users don’t actually facilitate and they declare the namespaces just in case? But this could be automatically cleaned up then?!