One of the major proponents for the use of RSS in education is Stephen Downes (he of OLDaily fame). Whilst I want to syndicate OLDaily this newsletter usually contains links within the description which was causing display problems in the incoming RSS feed to this blog. I contacted Stephen by email last night about whether the RSS specifications actually allow for hyperlinks within the item description. His response was in my inbox this morning. He says:
If there remains a rule against links in item>description, it is by now only a polite fiction. Pretty well every blogging tool and aggregator supports them.
That said, there is an incongruity in how I encode those links. While most systems replace the < encoding required by the XML specification (which is genuinely unforgiving) with the
