RE: Using Feeds That Invalidate Page

> sean at shapeable dot com

> How are we to get our page valid when the feed pulls in 
> characters and syntax that are not valid?  I've found that even feeds 
> from internet.com and yahoo.com will disallow validation through 
> validator.w3.org due to strange characters and whatnot.  The only 
> solution I could think of is have something coded in the feed 
> puller to 
> validate it prior to allowing it written to the page displaying the 
> feed(s). 

Depending on your server-side language, and the type of validation errors
you're specifically getting, I'd say that running it through a little
cleanup routine (to escape/encode characters) would be the most sensible
approach. If, for instance, you have PHP and the problem is caused by
serving pages as ISO 8859-1 charset but receiving feeds in UTF-8, you
could use something like the utf8_decode function
http://uk2.php.net/manual/en/function.utf8-decode.php

Patrick
________________________________
Patrick H. Lauke
Web Editor / University of Salford
http://www.salford.ac.uk
________________________________
Web Standards Project (WaSP) Accessibility Task Force
http://webstandards.org/
________________________________

Received on Thursday, 1 December 2005 10:02:23 UTC