Re: Re: The Profile and the Feed Validator

Sam Ruby wrote:
> As far as titles goes, here's a first pass at tests for how an
> ampersand should be coded:
>
>  = = =
>
> Conforming to the profile:
>
> <title>AT&#x26;T</title>

I think that's going too far. The issue is far more complicated than the 
profile might suggest. The idea was to make a simple recommendation that had 
a good chance of working. That doesn't mean the other encodings won't work 
under certain conditions. I don't think the feedvalidator should be 
returning warnings for feeds that are both valid and aren't known to cause 
problems. You're *definitely* going to get some complaints about that.

The thing is, the only time most people will use ampersands in a title are 
for things like "AT&T" or "Bill & Ted". Under those conditions, encoding is 
a lot easier. I believe there were a couple of aggregators that had problems 
with CDATA sections, but the other three forms of encoding should all work 
fine (except for aggregators where *nothing* works).

Double encoding is a different issue. That is arguably illegal as well as 
being know to fail with a number of major aggregators. I don't have a 
problem with a warning under those conditions (although I suspect you might 
still get some complaints).

> an exercise each of the board members should undertake before
> they cast a vote is to create a single weblog post in each of their
> respective blogs that contains either a ampersand or a less than sign in
> a title and then see what it takes to make their feed conform to the
> proposed profile.

I believe Randy collected some data on that already. I'm not sure if he ever 
published the results though.

Regards
James



 
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