Encoding Content in RSS 1.0

How to encode content in a RSS 1.0 feed is an unsolved problem, many persons have made different problems and there's no consensus for a definitive solution.

content:encoded with CDATA

RSS 1.0 Content Module

Example:

<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>What a <em>beautiful</em> day!</p>]]></content:encoded>

content:encoded without CDATA

Example:

<content:encoded>&lt;p&gt;What a &lt;em&gt;beautiful&lt;/em&gt; day!&lt;/p&gt;</content:encoded>

content:unencoded

Proposal: DanBri

Example:

<content:unencoded rdf:parseType="Literal"><p>What a <em>beautiful</em> day!</p></content:unencoded>

Others?

Is there any other ways to do it for RSS 1.0

Encoding content in RSS 2.0

How to encode content in a RSS 2.0 feed has proposed recently in A few examples for RSS 2.0. It doesn't define any mandatory behaviour only examples.

Encoding HTML tags

Example:

<description>&lt;p&gt;What a &lt;em&gt;beautiful&lt;/em&gt; day!&lt;/p&gt;;</description>

Encoding HTML tags usind a cdata comment

Example:

<description><![CDATA[<p>What a <em>beautiful</em> day!</p>]]></description>

Encoding content in Atom

There are two ways to do this in Atom, analogous to RSS 1.0's content:encoded and DanBri's proposal of content:unencoded.

This model applies to all elements that allow markup: <name>, <title>, <tagline>, <copyright>, <info>, <summary>, and <content>

For entity escaped content, it is:

<content type="text/html" mode="escaped">&lt;p&gt;What a &lt;em&gt;beautiful&lt;/em&gt; day!&lt;/p&gt;</content>

Of course, CDATA could be used for escaping in that situation too.

For literal, or inline XML, it is:

<content type="application/xhtml+xml"><p xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">What a <em>beautiful</em> day!</p></content>

Note the default namespace declaration on the <p> element to specify the XHTML namespace for the children elements. Atom requires all of the child elements to be in their appropriate namespace, and convention is to use a <div> or <span> element for that purpose.

Note: As of Jun2004, there are proposals for modifying the content model of all elements that allow markup in Atom, the above applies to the Atom 0.3 draft.