On delicious-discuss, the problems del.icio.us' RSS feed has with ampersands and '<' characters has been tracked down to the Perl XML::RSS module. One person looked into the history of that modules' encoding issues, which go back to 2002.
"XML::RSS tends to automatically unescape HTML entities as it reads them" (May 17, 2002) -- http://www.webreference.com/scripts/sidebar/5.html "Create a basic RSS feed with a dc:subject of "This & that", plain ASCII. Output the RSS feed using $rss->as_string. The resulting RSS feed will fail to validate as proper XML, as the '&' in the subject has not been encoded to the ASCII string '&' in the resultant RSS output. This is contrary to the documentation, which states that as_string will encode special characters. This bug is responsible for virtually all of the reported problems I've seen with XML::RSS, as well as virtually all of the resentment. May I ask why it's been stalled?" (Mon Dec 8 09:59:59 2003) -- http://rt.cpan.org/NoAuth/Bug.html?id=2285 And last but not least, it looks like this may still not be resolved in version 1.05: "- auto encode text?" -- http://search.cpan.org/src/KELLAN/XML-RSS-1.05/TODO
I left this out of my previous post on this topic, but since del.icio.us came up... I reported a bug early in del.icio.us's life about its not escaping HTML entities in URL descriptions.
Posted by jjwiseman at February 11, 2005 10:07 AM