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XHTML in RSS 2.0: Pipe Dream?

The RSS Public board has started discussing XHTML in RSS 2.0 again, sparked by Amazon’s DeWitt Clinton’s post about RSS versus Atom.

(Reposting my response…)

Personally, I would love to see RSS fully support XHTML. Since the spec is frozen, I’m curious as to how this would be accomplished in the profile. Does the scope of the profile include recommending extensions?

If the answer is “yes,” the stickiest part seems to be spotty aggregator support for RSS+XHTML. This is a classic chicken-and-egg problem: Do you recommend something and hope it will drive aggregator adoption, or do you have to wait for the aggregators to support it before you can recommend it?

Somewhat discouraging is John Udell’s piece on moving to RSS+XHTML back in 2003. The idea at the time was to get everyone to put <xhtml:body> in their feeds. Therein he describes adding XHTML to his RSS 2.0 feed, citing Sam Ruby’s and Don Box’s feeds as good examples.

Don has since abandoned that approach. His current feed has escaped xhtml in the description element. Udell gave up as well. His feed now has escaped regular html in the description element. Sam is the only one with XHTML still in his feed… he’s using Atom 1.0.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 5th, 2006 at 20:57 and is filed under syndication. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

One Response to “XHTML in RSS 2.0: Pipe Dream?”

  1. Jon Udell Says:
    July 6th, 2006 at 04:04

    > Udell gave up as well. His feed now has escaped
    > regular html in the description element.

    Heh. Actually the abandonment of xhtml:body was just an oversight. Last time I tweaked the XSLT code that emits the feed, I must have accidentally omitted it.

    I guess I’ll put it back, but two points:

    1. For the whole time it was there nobody made any special use of it. And I didn’t need it for my own purposes because I have all the original content in its canonical XHTML format.

    2. Because I write in XHTML and validate the well-formedness of what I publish, you will find that when unescape what’s in the description element it is in fact well-formed.