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Avoid Using "< [Cdata[ ]]>" in RSS

29 points by surprisetalk

by Sephr

1 subcomments

Manual string replacement with a hardcoded list of cases for escaping as suggested by the article isn't good advice for the use case of 'support inserting arbitrary text'.
Do use CDATA nodes, but only work on XML with an actual XML DOM library instead of string manipulation. Browsers have these built-in (DOMParser).

by aji

2 subcomments

i never really liked CDATA but i'm not buying the argument here since you can do the escaping with replaceAll("]]>", "]]]]><![CDATA[>") instead of four replaceAlls. (assuming you are writing your own xml serializer in javascript in 2026 for some reason)

by Pikamander2

0 subcomment

In my experience, liberal use of CDATA is often the only way to get third-party data-importing software to work correctly.
Whether it's efficient is a far second to whether it successfully imports the data.
Looking at you, WP All Import...

by nreece

1 subcomments

Imo, ease and multi-line HTML readability of CDATA outweighs that one edge case (it cannot directly contain its own terminator).

by gradientsrneat

3 subcomments

RSS is truly in its own little universe.
I recently became aware of RSS stylesheets. Apparently there is a specification for that called XSLT which is distinct from CSS in both form and function. However, there are plans by Google/Mozilla to remove XSLT from their browser engines for security/maintainability reasons. Apparently RSS supports javascript though, so it's possible to manipulate the RSS DOM that way. One could imagine a javascript polyfill that interprets XSLT, although I'm not sure if there's some cross-site security issues that would make that impractical.

by donohoe

0 subcomment

I would not follow this advice. The most trouble I’ve had with RSS was usually from not having it. I also have never used CDATA at a word level - just wrap the full text block in it.

by lapcat

1 subcomments

I come from a very different, old-school perspective, because I hand-write my blog posts in HTML and also hand-write my RSS feed in XML.
I've found CDATA invaluable, because I can just copy and paste the content from the HTML file to the XML file. I've never used the CDATA terminator characters in a blog post, so that's a non-problem.

by DonHopkins

0 subcomment

The worst use of the <BLINK> tag ever was the discussion held in the early days of RSS about escaping HTML in titles, whose attention-grabbing title went something like this: "Hey, what happens when you put a <BLINK> tag in the title???!!!"

The content of that notorious discussion went on and off and on and off for weeks, giving all the netizens of the RSS community blogosphere terrible headaches, with people's entire blogs disappearing and reappearing every second, until it finally reached a flashing point, when Dave Winer humbly conceded that it wasn't the user's fault for being an idiot, and maybe just maybe there was tiny teeny little design flaw in RSS, and it wasn't actually such a great idea to allow HTML tags in RSS titles.

I Wanna Be <![CDATA[

Sung to the tune of “I Wanna Be Sedated”, with apologies to The Ramones.

  Twenty-twenty-twenty four escapes to go, I wanna be <![CDATA[
  Nothin’ to markup and no where to quo-o-ote, I wanna be <![CDATA[
  Just get me through the parser, put me in a node
  Hurry hurry hurry before I go inline
  I can’t control my syntax, I can’t control my name
  Oh no no no no no
  Twenty-twenty-twenty four escapes to go….
  Just put me in a stylesheet, get me in a namespace
  Hurry hurry hurry before I go inline
  I can’t control my syntax, I can’t control my name
  Oh no no no no no
  Twenty-twenty-twenty four escapes to go, I wanna be <![CDATA[
  Nothin’ to markup and no where to quo-o-ote, I wanna be <![CDATA[
  Just get me through the parser, put me in a node
  Hurry hurry hurry before I go loco
  I can’t control my syntax I can’t control my name
  Oh no no no no no
  Twenty-twenty-twenty escapaes to go…
  Just get me through the parser…
  Ba-ba-bamp-ba ba-ba-ba-bamp-ba I wanna be <![CDATA[
  Ba-ba-bamp-ba ba-ba-ba-bamp-ba I wanna be <![CDATA[
  Ba-ba-bamp-ba ba-ba-ba-bamp-ba I wanna be <![CDATA[
  Ba-ba-bamp-ba ba-ba-ba-bamp-ba I wanna be <![CDATA[

by eqvinox

1 subcomments

Is it just me or is the back button broken on this website?

by poppadom1982

0 subcomment

[flagged]