It appears that HTML entities can cause RSS/syndication readers to fail when trying to read WordPress comment RSS feeds. Fortunately, a plugin has been written to resolve the issue. Entity 2NCR has a confusing name, but has a purpose that is easy to understand which is to convert various HTML Character Entities to their numeric equivalents.
HTML Explained
The Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is a simple markup language used to create hypertext documents that are platform independent. HTML documents are SGML documents with generic semantics appropriate for representing information from a wide range of domains. It can represent hypertext news, mail, documentation and hypermedia as well as menus of options, database query results and simple structured documents with in-line graphics. It can likewise represent hypertext views of existing bodies of information.
The World Wide Web (WWW) has been using HTML since 1990, making it one if the most widely used computer languages in the world. The WWW, in turn, is most commonly used for HTML whose popularity is due to the fact that it is the coding technology used to publish content on the Internet or the web. Programmers were quick to recognize HTML’s user friendliness due to the ease of learning it.
This ease of coding was significantly contributory to the proliferation of web sites. However, HTML is not a complete programming language because it lacks conditional tests and flow control statements. There are implementations that may offer extensions to the HTML language in order to accomplish these functions but are not actually part of the HTML standards. By embedding some suitable programming language code inside HTML, the power of real programming language is realized.
A character entity can be written in two ways in HTML. One is called the symbolic reference while the other is the numeric reference. Symbolic references start with an ampersand and ends with a semi colon. The description of the symbol which is generally a shortened version of the full expression, can be found between these two. The letters in the middle are case sensitive and are usually lower cased, though there are exceptions.
Numeric references also start with an ampersand and finish with a semi colon, but between them is a number preceded by a hash. These are less memorable than symbolic references but correspond only to just a single byte of data. This can be very useful if one is trying to optimize pages for minimum download time. Symbolic references are sometimes referred to as entity references while numeric references are also called decimal references.
Most unusual characters can be directly entered without any problem. However, HTML character entities can be used in case one does encounter a problem. Lines and paragraph are automatically recognized. A couple of blank lines are added when paragraphs are not recognized.
A character entity is a method used to display special characters normally reserved for use in HTML. For instance, the less than () are used as part of the HTML tag structure, thus both symbols are reserved for the use. If there is a need to display these symbols on one’s site, character entities can be used.
Problems
Many WordPress users are running afoul of character entities appearing in their comment RSS feeds, which many RSS/syndication readers fail on. The WordPress Plugin – Entity 2NCR seeks to resolve this by converting various HTML character entities such as