DonHopkins on May 11, 2014 | parent | context | favorite | on: The Unix Haters Handbook (1994) [pdf]
[...]
The worst use of the <BLINK> tag ever was the discussion held in the early days of RSS about escaping HTML in titles, whose attention-grabbing title went something like this: "Hey, what happens when you put a <BLINK> tag in the title???!!!"
The content of that notorious discussion went on and off and on and off for weeks, giving all the netizens of the RSS community blogosphere terrible headaches, with people's entire blogs disappearing and reappearing every second, until it finally reached a flashing point, when Dave Winer humbly conceded that it wasn't the user's fault for being an idiot, and maybe just maybe there was tiny teeny little design flaw in RSS, and it wasn't actually such a great idea to allow HTML tags in RSS titles.
Ya I remember this period. A lot of people got caught up in these types of questions. “What if you want to put an unescaped greater than symbol in your post title??” People spent years on this sort of pedantry.
Meanwhile Dave added enclosures and popularized podcasting making RSS even more important. He knew where to focus and what mattered.
DonHopkins on May 11, 2014 | parent | context | favorite | on: The Unix Haters Handbook (1994) [pdf]
[...]
The worst use of the <BLINK> tag ever was the discussion held in the early days of RSS about escaping HTML in titles, whose attention-grabbing title went something like this: "Hey, what happens when you put a <BLINK> tag in the title???!!!"
The content of that notorious discussion went on and off and on and off for weeks, giving all the netizens of the RSS community blogosphere terrible headaches, with people's entire blogs disappearing and reappearing every second, until it finally reached a flashing point, when Dave Winer humbly conceded that it wasn't the user's fault for being an idiot, and maybe just maybe there was tiny teeny little design flaw in RSS, and it wasn't actually such a great idea to allow HTML tags in RSS titles.