Currently, the only way to get Google Reader to display a YouTube
video is to include the invalid HTML code provided by YouTube.
However, it is possible (and recommended if you care about standards-
compliance) to embed YouTube videos using valid XHTML 1.0, as
described here:
http://www.bernzilla.com/item.php?id=681
However, when YouTube videos (or other videos from services like
Viddler, Vimeo, etc.) are embedded in this way, they are ignored by
Google Reader and simply do not show up in the Google Reader
interface.
The workaround to this problem is providing an enclosure element in
your RSS feed, but including that element without a length attribute
(which is the way I've seen it recommended at the Google Reader blog)
is not valid RSS 2.0. And who wants to actually figure out the valid
integer value for the length field, anyway?
I've verified that Bloglines recognizes YouTube videos embedded via
valid XHTML 1.0 without the enclosure element. It would be great if
Google would, too.
See the following for more information on how this change could
potentially impact a lot of users:
http://www.bernzilla.com/2008/02/16/wordpress-on-the-verge-of-valid-y...
Thanks for your time and consideration.
Bernie Zimmermann