June 25, 2003

Glitches Posting from Outlook with NewsGator

My last postings flushed out a few more glitches with using the Outlook / NewsGator and the Moveable Type posting plugins:

  • Any HTML-specific entity values such as   or – need to be removed or substituted, otherwise the RSS / XML produced from the posting will be invalid.
    (Of course, the xhtml validates OK, because there entities are defined and available in that environment!)
  • Font color attributes such as <font color="#003366"> are not being removed even if the "Remove font face and size tags when sending to plugin" option is set.
    Admittedly, this outcome may be viewed as a "feature" rather than a "bug", so I am taking this one under advisement - please feel free to add your opinions on this matter through the Comment facility.
I know Greg will fix these kinds of little niggles in good time, so I can certainly live with them for the moment.
Entry categories: Weblog
Posted by Jorgen Thelin at June 25, 2003 08:38 PM - [PermaLink]
 
Traceback List
Outlook posting glitches from NewsGator
Excerpt: Jorgen explains the problem in detail here. The &ndash was breaking the RSS feed when consumed by NewsMonster. BTW Jorgen, your feed is accepeted by NewsMonster now....
Weblog: Marc's terminal
Tracked: June 26, 2003 11:52 PM
Why We Need Echo's Content Model
Excerpt: Recent off-blog discussions with Greg Reinacker and Matt Berther about my recent problems posting to NewsGator from Outlook emphasize the great need for a true content model for the data in RSS/Echo feeds rather than just a list of syntactic tags. The ...
Weblog: TheArchitect.co.uk - Jorgen Thelin's weblog
Tracked: July 14, 2003 03:01 PM
Comments
Phew! I finally got rid of all the glitches in the data - there were way more entries affected than I originally thought. Posted by: Jorgen Thelin on June 25, 2003 08:54 PM
The font color is a feature :-) - the thought there is, many folks will have most of their font info set up via CSS and don't want overrides to face and size; but color is something that typically you'd want to pass through. Can you give more details on the entity problem? Are you saying that a &nbsp; entity makes it all the way through to the RSS? That would be the intended behavior...maybe I'm missing the point. Thanks... Posted by: Greg Reinacker on June 26, 2003 04:15 PM
Hi Greg, Yes, the &nbsp; entity makes it right the way into the RSS feed. The problem is that it is a predefined HTML/XHTML entity value, but not an XML entity - so the XML data of the RSS feed file is then not valid XML. The same applies for &ndash; which again isn't valid in an XML file. Sam's RSS Validator flags the error with the XML data, although of course the XHTML Validator (correctly) doesn't. What I expected / wanted is for a substitution mapping to be applied to these "strange" entity values *before* the data is sent to the plugin for posting to the blog engine (MT in this case). So &nbsp; gets replaced with a space character, the &ndash; gets replaced with a normal dash character, etc. Posted by: Jorgen Thelin on June 26, 2003 08:18 PM
The problem is posted on the NewsGator Support Forum as item 372 Posted by: Jorgen Thelin on June 26, 2003 08:23 PM
Jorgen, following up in an email with you... Posted by: Greg Reinacker on June 27, 2003 03:51 PM