Der Blog

Having found out that, unlike RSS, Atom allows embedded XHTML (and moreover is infinitely better defined), I've spent this evening converting my blog to emit it instead of RSS. So, if you're reading this at http://sucs.org/~pwb/blog/blog.py, you're looking at Atom with XSL instead of the old RSS with XSL. For some silly reason Atom still uses plain text dates instead of XML, but that's not actually a huge problem for the XSL as the format it does use, ISO 8601, can be manipulated using an XSL date-time library.

Annoyingly, it seems that although Planet understands Atom to a degree, it can only cope with content as CDATA (which ought not to be interpreted as XHTML elements, as Planet does, but rather as plain text). So my feed, whose content elements contain XHTML divs and are marked with the type="xhtml" attribute as the Atom spec dictates, are nonetheless stupidly interpreted as plain text. It's exactly the reverse of how it should be handled. So my old RSS feed is still there, at least until such time as Planet gets fixed, but is deprecated and will probably not get maintained any more.