intertwingly

David Ascher: I haven’t even mentioned that my blog title (as defined in the blogging software I’m using) used to be david ascher’s blog (which is supposed to render with a curly right single quotation mark, the way it would in a proper book). That worked fine on the website, but the use of the same variable value in the RSS feed messed up blogrolls and aggregators everywhere

It is a real shame that David has had to compromise typographic integrity due to the deficiencies of a few tools.

I, however, am a bit more obstinate.  Effective immediately, my site’s tagline is now “It’s just data” (note the right single quote).  This data appears as plain text utf-8 in my RSS 1.0 feed, as doubly escaped HTML in my RSS 2.0 feed, and as single escaped XML in my experimental atom feed.  It order to support older clients, this data remains as a ASCII “'” in my RSS 0.91, CDF, and ScriptingNews2 feeds.

If people can try out various aggregators and report on how they handle these various combinations, I would appreciate it.