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Could blockquotes be fixed for Slog's RSS feed?

I read the Slog through Google Reader, and blockquotes of more than one paragraph always become mangled there--they fall out of blockquote, so that it looks like the quoted section of the Slog post is part of the Slogger's writing, not what they're quoting. Here's a screenshot to demonstrate what it looks like:
http://bit.ly/dkg6ns

This was brought up in an unrelated thread a few months ago, and a commenter wrote,

"The reason that SLOG blockquotes look wrong in Google Reader is that the HTML is wrong in the first place. The proper way of doing the blockquote in HTML would be (but use <> instead of []; I just don't want to deal with escaping)

[blockquote]
[p]First paragraph.[/p]
[p]Second paragraph.[/p]
[/blockquote]

But SLOG formats them as:

[p][blockquote]First paragraph.[/p]
[p]Second paragraph.[/blockquote][/p]

This is just plain invalid HTML. It happens that most web browsers display them the way it's intended (with all the paragraphs going in the blockquote) but it's perfectly legitimate for HTML consumers to clean up the broken HTML in the way that Google Reader does. I am a Google employee and when I pointed this out to the Reader team ages ago they essentially said that making Reader match the behavior of browsers on this invalid HTML was unlikely to be a high priority for them.

I would be happy to talk to anyone on the Stranger tech team if they need more help fixing this issue with their feed! Contact me at glasser at davidglasser dot net."

(The comment was #8, left here: http://bit.ly/au5vSP)

Since it's Geek Week, could Anthony Hecht or one of the tech-savvy at-risk youth fix Slog so that this doesn't happen?

Christin Clatterbuck asked in Geek Week about 1 year ago | Report
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  • Tonks_small
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    Yeah, we're aware of this problem, and the cause, but it's not quite as simple as it seems. Our blogging system takes text typed into a web form and converts it to real HTML. That means detecting single and multiple line breaks and translating those into break or paragraph tags, respectively. There are a lot of other conversions going on, too, all through the magic of regular expressions.

    The way a blogger typically enters a blockquote is to put a couple line breaks and then start the quote. Since blockquotes are "block elements" in HTML-speak, when it contains multiple paragraphs, we end up with incorrectly nested tags. We've tinkered with it over the years and improved it some, but it still chokes on multiple paragraphs.

    Some feed readers are fine with this, but some don't like it so much. We'd love to get it fixed up right, but it hasn't made it to the top of the priority list recently.

    Anthony Hecht answered in Geek Week about 1 year ago | Report
    2 comments by Christin Clatterbuck and Keith Tyler…
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