Phil Ringnalda writes about the irony in Sam Ruby's post about valid RSS and the problems with entity encoded HTML. I've been quite vocal that entity encoded HTML is a bad idea that we need to get away from. Phil's post just illustrates exactly what I'm getting at. The forefathers of the XML specification intended for markup to be encoded with CDATA, NOT with entity encoding. Had the practice of entity encoding been avoided as bad form (as it should), issues like Phil's would almost be non-existent.
In related news, Shelley Powers points out an unexpected surprise she had when using the MovableType templates that the RSS Validator provides -- its will included the entire text of the post in the feed. This is OK if that is your intention, but it also means large feeds which suck up bandwidth. In being a good citizen I've begun offer a feed with the full content in addition to the standard feed with just a descriptive excerpt.
