Rss Issues

October 8, 2009 8:41 AM

Flag Suggestion: HTML Error in RSS

Example: This post has an issue with the umlat in RSS, but works fine on the web page.

posted by blue_beetle to Bugs at 8:41 AM (8 comments total)

The RSS feed is checking out fine in validator. What issue are you having with the umlaut?
posted by pb (staff) at 8:44 AM on October 8, 2009

And as for a specific flag for this, I think it's fairly rare that we have issues with the feed. They happen from time to time, but for the most part they're extremely unusual.
posted by pb (staff) at 8:45 AM on October 8, 2009

oh, I see the issue now. The post author used an HTML entity for the umlaut, and the feed was escaping the ampersand—so you could see the raw entity in most feed readers. Fixed that up so it shouldn't happen again.
posted by pb (staff) at 8:57 AM on October 8, 2009

And yeah if you've gotten to this level of identifying something like this, just feel free to MeMail us. We see this happen maybe once or twice a month and my suspicion is we'd see almost as many false positives if we added it to the flag options list.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 9:44 AM on October 8, 2009

False Positive is the name of my new melodic hardcore band.
posted by dersins at 11:06 AM on October 8, 2009

Pose Falsitive is the name of my old jazz squonk ensemble!
posted by not_on_display at 11:11 AM on October 8, 2009

When I finally go on tour as a one-man satisfactory percussive electronica act, I'll call myself Plutor and a Helicopter. Then when people ask where the helicopter is, I'll complain about baggage handling fees on airlines nowadays.
posted by Plutor at 11:23 AM on October 8, 2009 [1 favorite]

I will go back to combing through the rss feeds for wayward ascii characters while listening to Plutor's self-titled debut album "Helicopter".
posted by blue_beetle at 11:31 AM on October 8, 2009