And Apos Semicolon: A Cathapostrophe

written on Thursday, 25th March, 2010

This morning on Facebook syndication, I reviewed the article on android that I wrote yesterday. And one of the few HTML-incompatible XHTML-properties assaulted my eyes, impersonated by a bunch of entity references.

Specifically, I had escaped the typewriter apostrophe (') using named entity reference syntax ('). Unfortunately, I had forgotten that — while this entity is defined by XHTML 1.0 — it is actually illegal in plain ol’ HTML. This should not have been a problem, as these pages are served using the XHTML 1.0 doctype where ' points to the Unicode code point 0x27, so that you can use single quotes to delimit attributes.

The Django RSS framework however would put a plain "html" content-type into the Atom-Feed, so the references to the apostrophe remained unresolved when the Feed readers converted my contents for display. Instead, they correctly escaped the ampersand, which led to a lot of ugly entity references on my facebook feed.

So for now I am going to reference the apostrophe using the Unicode code point reference ’ (punctuation apostrophe: ’) which is actually recommended over the ASCII-compatible ' (typewriter apostrophe: '). Strictly speaking, I would not even need to use any entityref here, as 0x2019 is not XML syntax. Next I need to figure out if there is a way to configure the Django feeds framework to use XHTML as a content type for Atom feeds and to check if the results are real-world-compatible.

But really, this just shows once more that it is absolutely inhumane to edit XHTML by hand. So I’ll be looking for a suitable WYSIWYM editor to maybe handle this stuff.