Re: [syndication] XML Character encoding (again)

[Julian Bond <julian_bond@voidstar.com>]

Bill Kearney <ml_yahoo@ideaspace.net> wrote:
> Ian's right on all counts.  The only way to do this realiably is to rigorously
> examine the content being input and preview it back to the users.   Convert it
> all to UTF8.

Umm. Err.

I'm getting seriously pissed off with this. The site where this is 
happening typically contains UK English text so we're talking about a 
limited number of awkward characters. £, €, and smart quotes and 
that's about it.

I'm really tempted to just say "tough". If you don't like the character 
put in a "?". If you're parser barfs on my feed, well don't read it. 
Programming hours are too short to start figuring out client browser 
capability, UTF-8 conversion from arbitrary encodings and so on.

The point here is that it's RSS containing plain text read by human 
beenz. I'm not trying to get 100% perfect transfer of data, I'm trying 
to facilitate human communication.

Getting back to trying to solve this.

I'm genuinely puzzled that a CDATA block isn't enough to protect the 
text byte stream from aggressive parsers.

And I wonder if I'm confusing everyone by suggesting UTF-8. Perhaps if I 
used another encoding, the feed would be more likely to survive given 
that the vast majority of users are generating this text with Wintel PCs 
running IE.

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