I really try not to rant in this blog, it does no good really.

Last year I wrote about a decision I had to make about extending PodcastUtilities to support dates that did not follow the defined standard. It makes me sad when we cannot follow standards.

I was surprised at work when a colleague queries my pull request in which I did not escape a single quote char in an android resource file. The XML file looked like this

<string name="display_message">Your client's files</string>

Now I know that the XML standard does not need to have single quotes escaped in the text content of elements. A more plain English version is here.

It turns out that he was right, when I looked up the Android developer’s documentation. The results of not escaping single quotes is unpredictable at best. It would appear that the XML spec required elements of “&quot;” is not mentioned and also the “<” which is invalid can be used. I needed to correct my pull request to

<string name="display_message">Your client\'s files</string>

So in summary Android string resource files have an XML extension and have a passing resemblance to XML but in fact are not XML and I cannot find formal specification for them.