The Atom and RSS templates use ESCAPE=HTML in the title elements. However, HTML-escaped characters aren't valid according to http://feedvalidator.org/.

Removing ESCAPE=HTML works fine, but I haven't checked to see if there are any characters it won't work for.

For Atom, at least, I believe adding type="xhtml" to the title element will work. I don't think there's an equivalent for RSS.

Removing the ESCAPE=HTML will not work, feed validator hates that just as much. It wants rss feeds to use a specific style of escaping that happens to work in some large percentage of all rss consumers. (Most of which are broken). http://www.rssboard.org/rss-profile#data-types-characterdata There's also no actual spec about how this should work.

This will be a total beast to fix. The current design is very clean in that all (well, nearly all) xml/html escaping is pushed back to the templates. This allows plugins to substitute fields in the templates without worrying about getting escaping right in the plugins -- and a plugin doesn't even know what kind of template is being filled out when it changes a field's value, so it can't do different types of escaping for different templates.

The only reasonable approach seems to be extending HTML::Template with an ESCAPE=RSS and using that. Unfortunately its design does not allow doing so without hacking its code in several places. I've contacted its author to see if he'd accept such a patch.

(A secondary bug is that using meta title currently results in unnecessry escaping of the title value before it reaches the template. This makes the escaping issues show up much more than they need to, since lots more characters are currently being double-escaped in the rss.)

--Joey

Update: Ok, I've fixed this for titles, as a special case, but the underlying problem remains for other fields in rss feeds (such as author), so I'm leaving this bug report open. --Joey

I'm curious if there has been any progress on better RSS output? I've been prototyping a new blog and getting good RSS out of it seems important as the bulk of my current readers use RSS. I note, in passing that the "more" plugin doesn't quite do what I want either - I'd like to pass a full RSS feed of a post and only have "more" apply to the front page of the blog. Is there a way to do that? -- ?dtaht

To be clear, the RSS spec sucks to such an extent that, as far as I know, there is no sort of title escaping that will work in all RSS consumers. Titles are currently escaped in the way that tends to break the fewest according to what I've read. If you're unlucky enough to have a "&" or "<" in your name, then you may still run into problems with how that is escaped in rss feeds. --Joey