Why my syndication links were broken....

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2005/07/31 20:39 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2005/07/31/445838.aspx

The other day I complained about how My syndication links are broken.

We can blame it all on surrogates! :-)

You see, when I complained that There is no such thing as a surrogate character (dammit!), the post was sponsored by the first high surrogate, U+d800. And I made the mistake of putting that lone surrogate in quotes as the sponsor.

Community Server was using XML functionality that assumed standards conformant text -- which of course unpaired surrogates are not. So it was choking on the invalid text.

Earlier, when I was saying that blogs.msdn.com was broken, too? Well, my post was in there too - until it scrolled off of the most recent 25. That is also why it came back up so quickly.

The moral of the story? Don't use unpaired surrogate code points. My site was down to RSS aggregators for days!

(the Community Server folks will also try to handle this case a bit more gracefully in future versions, too!)

# Richard on 1 Aug 2005 2:57 AM:

For some reason the phrase "To be hoist by one's own petard" comes to mind ;-)

# Chris Hughes on 1 Aug 2005 11:07 AM:

Its hard not to find humor in this!

Keep up the great work.

Regards,

Chris

# Maurits [MSFT] on 1 Aug 2005 1:41 PM:

Surely the RSS page should well-form its own XML, escaping invalid characters as necessary?

# Michael S. Kaplan on 1 Aug 2005 1:44 PM:

Hi Maurits --

No argument from me -- that is why they plan to fix the problem in Community Server. :-)

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referenced by

2006/12/05 Validation of Unicode text is growing up

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