User-agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0.2 (X11/20050404)
Graham Parks wrote:
> On 30 Jul 2005, at 4:18 pm, Sam Ruby wrote:
>
>> I don't see this as so cut and dry. True, description ALLOWS
>> entity-encoded HTML, but the authors of the RSS 2.0 specification
>> decided not to REQUIRE entity-encoded HTML, apparently over concerns of
>> backwards compatibility.
>
> But you know as well as I that the word "allows" here is bogus; the
> only way this can possibly work is for anything that looks like HTML
> markup to be interpreted HTML. Or essentially, that RSS descriptions
> must always be interpreted as HTML.
It can't always be done, hence my statement that this isn't cut and dry.
I don't want to belabor this, but I will provide two links:
http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2004/03/16/EscMadhttp://www.intertwingly.net/blog/2004/05/28/detente
> However, my conclusion about iTunes was based on the de facto standard
> here. I'd expect any aggregator, when faced with that RSS item, to
> decode the apostrophe, so therefore iTunes should as well.
If you look closely at the current iTunes spec, you will notice that it
makes absolutely no mention of the RSS 2.0 description element. What it
defines instead is an itunes:summary element. Apparently, in the
absense of that element, it will make a best effort to build a summary
from the description. Furthermore, best effort in this case does not
appear to include sanitizing any tag soup that is found.
The inevitable result of this chain of events is that people learn to
depend on the undocumented function, and report bugs when things do not
work as expected. Particular when those expectations are based on
observations of how other applications behave, particularly applications
developed by individuals who have decided to label some portion of the
relevant specs "bogus" and coded accordingly.
Net: the combination of not setting expectations properly (clear specs),
and attempting to do the user a favor is actually causing more bug
reports to be generated and for developer satisfaction to go down.
- Sam Ruby
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