[simonw]

The RSS 2.0 spec has a horrible flaw:

https://www.rssboard.org/rss-2-0-1-rv-6#hrelementsOfLtitemgt

> An item may also be complete in itself, if so, the description contains the text (entity-encoded HTML is allowed; see examples)

Note "is allowed", not "is required". This caused SO MANY problems back in the day, because the spec didn't clarify if you should or should not include HTML in that element - and there was no way of telling, when parsing a feed, if the author was in the "entity-encoded HTML" or "YOLO and just stick plain text in there" camp.

IIRC, Atom came about precisely because the RSS specifications didn't provide the level of detail needed for a spec to be truly interoperable.

[eduction]

In practice, the description is universally considered to be html encoded. Everything is decoded. If you try to stick unencoded html in there it gets rendered as text. If you really don’t want to encode you can stick it in CDATA and it will just work per the xml spec. I’m trying to remember what the downside of this approach is - I think maybe it kept people from sticking unencoded ampersands in plain text or something.

But I think it’s worth noting that a cultural tradition emerged that papered over the flawed spec. I think that is actually pretty common with specs, even if the rss2 one is extra loose.

Maybe having a correct spec isn’t everything.

[ttepasse]

> But I think it’s worth noting that a cultural tradition emerged that papered over the flawed spec.

Back in 2013 a developer of a feed crawler wrote a selection of things people get wrong with their feeds.

https://inessential.com/2013/03/18/brians_stupid_feed_tricks

[eduction]

This is definitely a good example of "RSS culture."

(This particular one isn't papering over flaws in the spec, many of thse are advising against doing things that violate either RSS or XML spec, or are subjective opinions additive to the spec (e.g. always have a datetime). But ya this is basically what I mean.)