The Profile and the Feed Validator

Sam Ruby, the lead author of the Feed Validator, sent me an e-mail
about the RSS Profile that's worth responding to here.

Here's his email:

My question is how seriously do you want this profile to be taken?  A
concrete example:

> A publisher SHOULD encode "&" and "<" in plain text using hexadecimal
> character references. When encoding the ">" character, a publisher
> SHOULD use the hexadecimal reference &#x3E;.

The feed validator is in a position where it could issue warnings (not
errors, warnings) whenever it encounters the string "&amp;", "&lt;", or
"&gt;"; or  <!CDATA[[]]> sections that contain "&", "<", or ">"
characters in places like RSS 2.0 titles and categories.  No messages
would be produced in situations where CDATA is used and these precise
characters are *NOT* found, nor for entities like &quot; when found
outside the context of CDATA sections.

Even as surgical as these specific checks would be, my experience and
expectation would be that such a change would trigger a shitstorm.  And
that somehow I would be blamed for being "political" in this matter.

So my question to you three is: if the profile passes, will you stand
behind it and vigorously defend the messages produced?  If you are
concerned about the possibility of the message itself being
inflammatory, simply propose wording for the same.  My plans would be to
simply lift the exact wording from the profile to the extent it makes
sense, and point to the profile itself for additional guidance.

As I see it, the alternative is for me to not treat the profile as
meant to be considered as a serious body of work.  If you see another
alternative that I'm missing, I would be interested in that too.



 
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