Re: RSS Profile Character Data Advice

Sean Lyndersay wrote:
> One man's feature is another man's bug, as they say. As the person
> who designed how and when HTML markup would be supported in IE7's
> RSS view, I'll try not to be offended :).

Actually most people seem to think IE7 is doing the right thing.

> For all elements other than item/description, it seemed clear
> that in widespread practice, HTML markup was only needed in
> item/description.

I'm curious, did you actually do some kind of research to establish how 
widely HTML markup was used in titles, or was this just the general 
impression that you had? The reason I ask, is because most other aggregator 
developers seem to have reached the opposite conclusion (although it's not 
always clear whether someone has made a concious decision to do something or 
whether it's a bug).

Speaking for myself, the analysis I've done on feeds in the wild has 
convinced me that supporting HTML markup in titles is essential. As an 
example, here are a couple of feeds from major vendors that are using markup 
in titles as of right now:

http://rss.news.yahoo.com/rss/topstories
http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot
http://www.google.co.uk/blogsearch_feeds?hl=en&q=at%26t&t=&ie=utf-8&num=10&output=rss
http://blogs.msdn.com/michael_affronti/commentrss.aspx?PostID=565208
http://channel9.msdn.com/rss.aspx?threadid=173894

Some of those will be transient - the characters that needed to be HTML 
escaped may not be visible by the time you view the feed, but they crop up 
often enough to be annoying if you use IE as your aggregator. Does that sort 
of thing not bother you?

> More abstractly, it is difficult for many clients to display
> free-form HTML in fields other than description, and still have
> some level of control over the output. Also, some clients that
> use a three-pane layout, e.g. Thunderbird, that includes a list
> of titles, it's impossible/impractical to display markup.

Which is why they typically strip presentational markup and convert any 
entities into their corresponding characters.

Anyway, I appreciate your feedback regarding your interpretation of the spec 
and your reasons for doing things the way you do. It would be nice if some 
of the other aggregator vendors would do the same.

Regards
James



 
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