Named entities invalidating output in Thunderbird

  • When viewing RSS feeds in Mozilla Thunderbird, you have the option of loading the actual (X)HTML version of the article/post/whathaveyou or simply the headline and summary. However, what loads fine(sent as XML) does not load fine in Thunderbird.
    It turns out that named entities such as   are not recognized, whereas the numerical equivalent   works wonderfully. The numerical codes should be preferred anyway.
    To get my feed rendering fixed in Thunderbird I had to edit the get_calendar() function and a few other named entities custom to my template.
    I think the ideal solution is for WordPress to simply convert to all numerical entity references.

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
  • Thread Starter seththomasrasmussen

    (@seththomasrasmussen)

    wtf… i put the entity examples in backticks…
    anyways, i think you get the basic gist:
    -named entities bad
    -numiercal code entities good
    -fix WP code to reflect this

    Last I checked, character entities are considered valid references in XHTML, as well as in RSS, at least version 0.9x. So should this not be something for Thunderbird devs to fix, and not WordPress’?
    (In any case, this could be dealt with through a small plugin to convert entities to NCRs.)

    XML parsers usually do not check the DTD, so named entities are not recognized. When using XML (for example XHTML and RSS) you really should use numerical entities only, or even better, just use the right character in unicode.

    The problem with named entities appears also in Opera when you send XHTML with the right mime-type.

    “XML parsers usually do not check the DTD”

    Since the various flavors of RSS and XHTML are in fact DTDs, I’m not sure how applications which support them would not check their respective DTD(s).

    I don’t disagree with what is the preferred method, only that if a program supports the collective XHTML DTDs (minus Strict, which has its own set of demands…), they should support ALL of it, of which named character entities are included.

    I just posted a patch that fixes this, and a plugin that does the same for those that don’t want to wait for it to be integrated.
    (more details/context in my blog)

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
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