On Aug 4, 2005, at 7:24 PM, Robert Sayre wrote:
Leading and trailing whitespace input for these fields should be discarded by a robust scanner, and doing so proposes no risk to compliant feeds, unlike guessing the "true meaning" of an ampersand in an RSS feed. So, it will be my recommendation to ignore this MUST-level requirement of the Atom spec in any consumer aggregator that I contribute to. I think it might be useful as bozo filter in an Atom protocol server, because the lazy thing for client implementors to do is find a decent serialization library. The lazy thing for publishers to do is concatenate strings in their loosely-typed language of choice.
Uh, anyone who's lazily concatenating strings is pretty soon going to end up with a free ampersand or something worse in their Atom feed. Right? -Tim
