I couldn’t agree more about RSS

Jackob Nielsen made a statement about RSS today in the Wall Street Journal which I 100% agree with.

People who are in the field often use the term 'RSS' [Really Simple Syndication] to refer to 'news feeds' because that's the name of the technology. But in one of our studies, 82% of those we surveyed did not know what RSS meant.

So one of the real strong recommendations is to stop calling it 'RSS' and start calling it 'news feeds,' because that explains what it does.

- Via WSJ.com 

RSS 2.0 Title element encoding

I just ran into this RSS title encoding problem myself. I choose to double encode the title elements. Meaning encode your HTML first then do the XML entity encoding. Unfortunately the RSS 2.0 spec won't help you; because it doesn't say what it can or can't be. I don't allow HTML to be included in any of our RSS title elements. However, I do allow basic characters such as &, < etc… to be included in the title element. 

So when I encode the following:

AT&T

It will look like this in the RSS document. 

AT&amp;amp;T

BTW, FireFox and IE Readers don't support double encoding. As RSS readers they suck anyways so why support them? Maybe they will change there evil ways.