New Planet coming soon

I’ve been playing with the Planet lately and a new version is coming soon.

It now uses the rather cool Kid template language for the templates, which ensures that the output is as close to real XHTML as possible. This also means that your feeds must be properly encoded — if not, then the content will be mercilessly dropped. That’s the new world of XML…

It might sound hard when one considers that browsers have been handling slightly-broken content for years, commonly referred to as “tag-soup”. The advantage of strict compliance to XHTML is the number of programmically transformations possible because we now require the input to be a valid XML tree.

Anyway, consider this post a sort of test-post for the new Planet. As such, I’ll start by testing the encoding of ampersands: &. WordPress ought to encode it as &amp;amp; in the feed, something which Blogger.com seems to forget. An alternative is to wrap the whole thing in a <![CDATA[ ... ]]> construct. This is what WordPress actually does, now comes the question: does it remember to esacpe the CDATA declaration I just made? Lots of things to consider here :-)

8 Comments

  1. Kristian Kristensen:

    Actually, I pretty glad you’re doing this, because it’ll hopefully mean that your feed will be proper XML :-) I’ve had quite a bit of trouble with your feed and my news aggregator, which isn’t quite as forgiving as a browser.

    You might want to check out feed burner (www.feedburner.com), which takes you feed and prettifies it amongst other things. I use it on my blog.

  2. Martin Geisler:

    Well, I blame the WordPress guys and gals for any brokenness in my feed! :-) But with a strict XML parser in the Planet I will notice the errors quicker and correct them.

  3. Kristian Kristensen:

    Exactly, blame Wordpress :-) It’s also one of the reasons I started using feedburner.

  4. Martin Geisler:

    Hehe :-) I don’t hope my feed is broken now, is it? For I can parse it just fine…

  5. Martin Geisler:

    So far the WordPress feeds look good, it’s only the Last-Modified date that is wrong once in a while. But the <![CDATA[ ... ]]> thingy I used above was correctly escaped.

  6. Martin Geisler:

    Another comment to test the Planet cache…

  7. Martin Geisler:

    It seems to work so far :-)

  8. Martin Geisler:

    The Planet is here… Please write me if you want write access to the Subversion repository or if you have any complains and/or suggestions :-)

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