Re: RSS Profile Character Data Advice

> I think the best way to handle it is to tell people HTML shouldn't be
> used outside of item-description

I've being saying this for years now.

If people want fancy formatting, get a web page.  These feeds are not ones
you're looking for... (waves hand...)

> tell people they should encode <, >
> and & with hexadecimal character references

Why?  XML itself allows for the five references amp, apos, quot, lt and gt.
To numerically encode them isn't ever necessary.  If a reader can't handle
these basic five, well, then it has much bigger problems.

> and simply tell
> publishers that other encodings are discouraged because they are
> unlikely to work properly in most aggregators.

It would seem you're mixing terms here.  Plenty of character encodings work
quite well for RSS, thank you.

What is often misunderstood is entity references and their numeric
equivalents.  You generally should avoid using HTML entity references (like
&eacute, &copy and the like).  These are found only in HTML, not in XML.
With use of a DTD you can include them, but let's not go down THAT rabbit
hole here.

And it also bears mentioning that numeric references are for UNICODE ONLY.
That is, the numbers used only correspond to a UTF8/16/32 glyph and NOT
whatever other encoding a document might be using.  As in, you might have
the document encoded as something other than UTF-8 (the default XML
encoding) and want to use the numeric reference for a glyph.  Unless the
encoding uses the same numbering as Unicode (which is unlikely) then you
cannot just use that number.  You have to find that glyph in Unicode and use
than number instead.

So yes, avoid use of HTML character references.  Use only XML's own five
character references.  Then use Unicode numeric references for anything
else.

> If we muddy the water with advice for how to deal with double
> escaping in places markup shouldn't appear, in my view we perpetuate
> the problem.

Agreed.

> MSIE 7 has given us an ideal opportunity to discourage HTML markup
> outside item-description. We should take it.

I'm not sure using a bad tool as a reference is a good idea.  God help you
when the other limitations of a tool start being offered as excuses to
further bastardize a spec.  Just because the tools suck doesn't mean the
spec has to bend to tyranny.

That said, I agree that markup outside of item/description is a bad thing.

-Bill Kearney
Syndic8.com



 
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