This issue is a bit geekish but I thought it was worth making a record nevertheless. We had a bit of problem with some incoming RSS feeds to this blog displaying html markup. After investigation and consultation with Paul Burdick of pMachine.com his explanation forms the basis of this article. Thanks Paul.
Whilst RSS is an excellent syndication solution hyperlinks within a syndicated article can cause problems since the RSS standard apparently does not allow an author to
explicitly state how they have handled html in their RSS feed; hyperlinks are defined by html. Some people escaped HTML with a CDATA in their XML, leave the HTML
in there (usually a bad idea since the XML is difficult to parse), or
covert the HTML tags into HTML entities which may be written out as tags. This means that some applications receiving RSS feeds containing , hyperlinks and other markup, e.g. from another blog may not be able to handle html markup within the feed. Our pMachine blog engine for instance attempted to strip out the html left some residual markup. With the help of Paul we are working on a solution.
