In the commentary attached to Ben Hammersley's RSS discussion, someone (whose name got truncated) cites Jon Postel's famous dictum in regards to use of HTML in RSS:
Escaped html in the <DESCRIPTION>tag is very common and isn't going to disappear any time soon. So let's make it a convention as RSS creators to be sparing and deliberately strip the more aggressive tags when we create it. As consumers, we should be writing code that strips the tags we don't like and not complain too much when people throw incomplete tables at us. Be lenient with what you consume, be pedantic and accurate with what you create.
I took a run at this problem last week on a plane trip. For a long time now, I've intended to rip out the MS DHTML edit control in Radio, and pop in Ektron's slick eWebEditPro, which I wrote a column about last year. It should be a straightforward swap that would make Radio's WYSIWYG editor able to emit either clean HTML or XHTML, rather than the hideous stuff that MS control spews out now.
Given the amount of writing I do here, I'd be quite willing to pay something for a add-in that would enable me to honor Postel's dictum -- that is, "to be conservative in what you send."
For some reason, though, I went round in circles. Couldn't seem to find the right combination of UserTalk, HTML, and JavaScript to get that Ektron control working in place of the default WYSIWYG control. I'll take another run at it one of these days, but I just thought I'd report the idea in case somebody else wants to go there first.
Former URL: http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2002/05/23.html#a262