[wp-hackers] Need more RSS hooks

[Danny Ayers]

On 1/27/06, Elliotte Harold <elharo at metalab.unc.edu> wrote:

> Sorry to be so blunt, but this is not a bug. If there's a bug here, it's
> the attempt hide markup in a CDATA section.

Escaped markup in XML is certainly more trouble than it's worth. Norm
Walsh has a couple of good pieces on the matter [1,2] (I'll wager you
have too, Elliotte ;-) . It's ugliness is reflected in certain
ambiguous specs and inconsistent app behaviour.

Not far from the topic of this thread, this is a very compelling
reason that if WP was to support *only one* feed format (by default)
it shouldn't be RSS 2.0.

The classic case in RSS was when Reuters had stock ticker symbols in
their content, e.g.

"blah blah <GOOG> blah"

which went into the feed as :

<description>blah blah &lt;GOOG&gt; blah</description>

- and every single RSS reader rendered this as

"blah blah  blah"

Sam Ruby's got a write-up at [3], as he put it: "Your titles and
descriptions can be 100% valid according to the RSS specification. 
And yet not work as you intend in any aggregator."

Fortunately there is now Atom.

Cheers,
Danny.

[1] http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2003/08/20/embedded.html
[2] http://norman.walsh.name/2003/09/18/unescmarkup
[3] http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/2004/05/28/detente

--

http://dannyayers.com