Well, having been in RSS 2.0 for awhile (since I hate ATOM...) I don't
think this is really a problem at all.  Everything, everywhere is
single-escaped (XML-style) and things that will be escaped when the
content is rendered as XHTML (description only) are double-escaped.
In this case, it's in the title.  Therefore, " might make some
sense, but since that literal is in the original we get the XHTML
version "  either " or " will work in the title, and
" will work in many web-(browser)-based readers, because it
will be 'accidentally' rendered as XHTML.  I could probably add an
html_enitity_decode statement to all non-XHTML fields...

On 9/28/06, David Osolkowski <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On 9/26/06, Andy Mabbett <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> >there instead of &quot; would
> >be perfectly legal and solve the problem, the escaped ampersand is my
> >code escaping out your HTML entities, which the validator then finds
> >bad because there should be no enitities in a <title>).
>
> it seems reasonable to me that, if the HTML in question contains "&"
> then the corresponding title component of the feed should contain
> "&amp;". Why is that not the case?

Unfortunately, escaping special characters in RSS feeds is almost
entirely unspecified.  They can be unescaped, single-escaped,
double-escaped, even triple-escaped, and there's not always
standardization on one method.  This is one of the big reasons the
Atom format was developed in the first place.  So if the HTML *source*
contains "&amp;" (for the sake of playing nice), converting that to
RSS could produce any of "&", "&amp;", or "&amp;amp;" and each one
would be considered valid by different people and software.  I believe
this is also why the feed validator prints a warning; it honestly
doesn't know whether this will work or not.

http://weblog.philringnalda.com/2005/12/18/who-knows-a-title-from-a-hole-in-the-ground
illustrates some of the variety in support for handling different
methods of escaping even when using a format with well-defined rules.
If possible, it makes things easier to just not use any special
characters in your title at all.

- David
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