It’s just data

Joy of encoding

In my comments section, Timothy Appnel is evangelizing the use of CDATA.  Unfortunately, at the moment his RSS 0.91 Index Feed is not well formed XML, whereas his RSS 1.0 Index Feed is.  Both use CDATA, but the difference is that the RSS 1.0 feed contains the string

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1" ?>

This allows the use of Microsoft's so-called "smart quotes" to be rendered as a rectangle.  Somewhat better rendering would be achieved through the use of

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="windows-1252"?>

Another approach would be to use the demoronizer tool.

#*!+$@ Microsoft! I can see the commercial now... uh, yeah i was advocating correct use of CDATA in RSS Feeds and Windows slipped in some really funky non-standard characters that broke my feed and made me look like a dofus. I said that's it and I made the switch and it hasn't happened to me again.

seriously, good catch. thanks. yet another tweak that should be added to the default MovableType RSS templates.

"demoronizer" though? what are you implying about me Sam? Hasn't there been enough name calling this week? ;)

Posted by Timothy Appnel at

How did Windows "sneak" these characters into your XML? I assume you typed them or cut & pasted them yourself without your operating system acting on it's own.

Or did you edit in Microsoft Word and forget to turn off "smart quotes"?

Posted by Dare Obasanjo at

Sam Ruby comments on "Don't use UserLand's validator"

Many more feeds would validate as XML (and therefore be of far greater utility to those feed readers that are based on XML parsers) if people would simply declare the encoding that they are using. A very popular encoding is iso-8859-1. If you are...

Excerpt from dive into mark at

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