Atom Valid on WordPress 2.3
I just upgraded to WordPress 2.3, the whole process took a matter of minutes. According to the W3C Feed Validation Service, my Atom 1.0 feed is now valid. Woohoo!
Valid Atom means characters like & and < will render properly in an increasing number of tools. Thanks to clearly defined text constructs, the meaning of such characters is not ambiguous.
WordPress is but one link in the chain of syndication tools. Using Atom helps ensure sites like JavaBlogs, DZone, and others can consume and syndicate content accurately. As I wrote in early September, I explicitly customized my WordPress installation to disable RSS. I simply do not trust RSS because every person writing an RSS tool might interpret entities differently.
Apostrophe Rant
Now that WordPress Atom feeds appear to handle apostrophes a bit better, what can we do about Greengrocers’ apostrophes? It must be embarrassing to work at companies where the official company name makes this stupid mistake. (Answer: the plural of CD is CDs, not CD’s)
Now I fully expect my faithful readers to point out all of the grammatical and spelling errors in this blog. That should teach me to mock apostrophe abuse.