Another Atom title question
Another Atom question... (Is there a mailing list or forum somewhere where I can ask questions instead?)
How must a client display the following title?
<title>&</title>
When defaults are applied, this expands to:
<title mode="xml" type="text/plain">&</title>
The value is inline XML and it should be displayed as plain text.
Were the type HTML, then clearly it should be displayed &. But, since it’s plain text, I believe it should be displayed as &.
But — here’s where I’m tripped up — this case is part of a set of examples that imply that it should be displayed as & and not as &.
This example has to be correct, and I have to be wrong, because the following would be flat-out illegal:
<title>&</title>
Here’s what it comes down to — the Atom spec talks about escaped content, but doesn’t specify what that means, and it’s giving me some trouble.
If mode=xml, which entities should be converted? Ampersands, yes. What about lt, gt, and apos?
If I do convert lt, gt, and apos also (when mode=xml), then I don’t understand how the third example in the History of <blink> tag test work. It looks like this:
<title type="application/xhtml+xml" mode="xml"><div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">History of the <blink> tag</div></title>
If I do translate lt and gt (at parse time), then <blink> turns into <blink> — and, consequently, you don’t see it, because now it’s an HTML tag. The test clearly says it should be displayed as <blink>, which means that the string value has to be <blink>.