Bill Kearney wrote:
> Or just compose a list of the abberant readers and 'help them' correct the
> situation.

I don't think it's the readers that are the problem. They're just serving
their users, and users just wan't to see the feed content. They don't care
how evil the technical composition of that content might be. They don't care
if it's well-formed XML. They don't care if it strictly compliant with RFC
3023 charset encoding. They just want to be able to read their feeds.

If you want a list of "abberant readers" though, just ignore IE7, Firefox
and RSSOwl and there's a good chance that almost everything else will be on
that list.

> Double-encoding (for anything other than showing actual markup
> as 'text') is just plain evil and should be stamped out of existance.

That's the real problem and not one that will be easy to solve. How do you
stamp out all those feeds that are double-encoding? If you can do that then
the readers will (or at least should) soon follow suit.

One possible plan of attack is to hope that the lack of support for
double-encoding in IE 7 and Firefox 2 will eventually persuade feed
producers that double-encoding is a bad idea. However since neither product
has been released yet, it may be some time before that'll result in any
significant change.

Actively promoting the practice (through the RSS Board profile and the
feedvalidator) is another idea. It may be a good idea to target some of the
main feed producing products (wordpress? textpattern? I don't know much
about these things) and online feed hosts (blogspot, livejournal, myspace,
etc).

However, if you want this to work it would help if you had a good solid
argument to back up your proposal. Just telling people that what they're
doing is evil probably won't be enough. They're going to want to know the
benefits. What does it get them? What are the negative impacts? etc.
Remember that many of these people are trying to run a business.

Regards
James