UPDATE: 2/4/11 — This change is being scheduled as part of one of our forthcoming incremental releases.  Please check back for updates to this article.

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Please be advised that we are making a change to the content of all of our RSS feeds in an upcoming release, scheduled for 2/2/2011 or shortly thereafter. This change will provide greater flexibility in displaying feed content, and may impact existing applications that have been built on top of our feeds.

Today, for each <item> in our RSS feeds, the <description> and <content:encoded> nodes contain the exact same summary of the item. In this summary, all lines breaks and HTML tags have been stripped out. After the upgrade on or shortly after 2/2/2011, the <content:encoded> node will contain all of the line breaks and HTML tags that were included in the original description, wrapped in CDATA tags. The <description> node will continue to contain the stripped down version of the item’s content, as it does today.

If you do not wish for line breaks or HTML tags to be displayed in your application(s), please ensure that existing implementations leverage the <description> node, and not the <content:encoded> node of our feeds.

It should be noted that App Studio widgets will be able to faithfully render all line breaks and HTML markup contained in the <content:encoded> node of feed items. You can take advantage of this feature by checking the “HTML Enabled” box and unchecking the “Remove extra spaces, tabs, linebreaks” box in the Content properties panel of Text Components.

Thanks,
Your Friends at KickApps