Re: RSS Profile Character Data Advice

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

This has got nothing to do with fancy formatting. The issue we're trying to 
resolve here is how to let people include ampersands and angle brackets in 
their titles.

>> 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.

The reason for that suggestion was to ensure that our recommended encoding 
format would work in Bloglines. It actually relies on the *existence* of a 
bug in Bloglines rather than avoiding a bug. Since Bloglines is still one of 
the most popular aggregators today, I believe it's important to tell people 
how to get their feeds to work with it.

>> 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.

I guess that is a little confusing - "escaping" might be a better term to 
use. The HTML spec use the term "encode" for all sorts of things. I believe 
the XML spec consistently uses the term "escape" when talking about entity 
reference conversions.

> 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.

We're not writing a spec here. The reason for the profile (IMO) is to help 
people get their feeds to work with the popular RSS implementations that 
exist today. We aren't bending the spec to deal with sucky tools, but we are 
telling people in what way those tools suck. That way they at least have the 
knowledge to bend their feeds to work with those tools, if they so choose.

Regards
James



 
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