Quote Conundrum

Poor Cory. He let of a little steam in his post about why he hates "Sharp Typography" and the reaction was all too predictable. I understand his problem though. I know exactly how busy Cory is and why he doesn't have a lot of time to deal with things that will break his RSS feed. But I also understand the side of the people using Smarty Pants(tm) (read: me). Why should I have to go back to something below what we should be able to use because it breaks his tool? On the other hand, why should we be surprised if Cory doesn't write about anything on our sites because he know that we use "Sharp Typography" and he doesn't have time to deal with it. But if we always stick to the LCD so that no one tool breaks, will we ever make any progress?

It's one of those problems where nobody is wrong and there is no easy solution. I guess the best idea would be to have Cory's tool fixed so that when he pastes some text with non-ASCII characters the tool does the right thing and entifies the offending characters. RSS is XML and XML is well-formed, so we see how it's easy to break. There is no graceful degradation in XML, even though Mark thinks there should be in the tools. With HTML, you can "break it" and yet the content will still be readable, as Wired and ESPN have done with their spiffy sites. They look rather plain in Netscape 4, but they also look wonderful in any standards compliant browser.

It's either fix Blogger, have Cory use this BBEdit quick-fix, or try and convince everybody else to stop using "Sharp Typography."