[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.)