Technorati ugly bug

Note: this entry has moved.

Last week I wrote a post about the XPathNavigatorReader. That post has some XML showing the output of a webservice, output generated from the Pubs sample database. As you know, there's a title table. Well, as I already said in a previous post, the <xmp> element is a useful one to me: it's like <pre> but you can have markup that is not parsed (think C# XML documentation tags...). As it's not parsed, you don't need to escape anything. Cool, IMO.

So, the following code showed up in that post, *unescaped* inside that xmp element: 

<XPathNavigatorReader>
  <titles>
    <title_id>BU2075</title_id>
    <title>You Can Combat Computer Stress!</title>
  ...

Due to a very ugly bug in Technorati, I had to escape tags in that post. Why? Because they are parsing the whole page (not just the <head> section) searching for a <title> element to use as the weblog title, and in my case, they found the one in my XML snippet from Pubs!!! Hence, they think this is the title of my weblog :( :

Bottom line: escape content to avoid buggy sniffers... Damn, I was so happy to avoid harmful escaped markup...

Special thanks to my friend and partner VGA for warning me about this!