On Nov 12, 2004, at 8:39 PM, James Britt wrote:

> Francis Hwang wrote:
>> Well, as far as I know every single version of RSS has at least one 
>> glaring problem: It underspecifies what you're supposed to do if you 
>> want to send XML tags in your <description>. So you end up doing 
>> bloody awful things like actually _escaping_ your XML tags, and if 
>> you write a blog about, say, XML (there are a few, I think), and 
>> you're emitting escaped XML markers in your RSS code, you actually 
>> have to _double-escape_ them to get them to show up in most 
>> aggregators:
>
> Don't CDATA sections do it for you?
>
>  <item>
>  <description>
>   <![CDATA[
>    Remember, when you're switching to XHTML, the BR tag needs to be
>    self-closing: <br />
>   ]]>
>  </description>
>  </item>
>

CDATA works, and it doesn't, more or less like escaping markup works, 
but doesn't. Keep in mind that these days my main site is all XHTML and 
I lean really hard on the basic conformance promise behind any XML 
dialect. So I think it's pretty inelegant to put conformant XML (XHTML) 
inside of conformant XML (RSS), but wrap it in an intermediate layer of 
CDATA, which says "this stuff isn't necessarily well-formed anything." 
I think it's a useful feature of XML that it will fall down and die 
without being well-formed, but when you put stuff inside of CDATA 
sections you don't get any of that benefit. (I'd go so far as to say 
that if you are working in a domain where these sorts of conformance 
concerns are not worth the hassle, you'd be better off using something 
like YAML instead of XML.)

F.