I signed up for the TypePad trial before going to bed Tuesday, gave it a quick whirl before work in the morning and immediately submitted three support tickets. Kudos to Six Apart for making it simple to report problems and responding very quickly (Mena herself replied to two).
I feel the need the need to write about one of the problems I reported. When a user types & within an entry, TypePad does not automatically encode it as & within the published pages. This means that a user foolish enough to blog about AT&T or link to an AT&T Wireless forum post (& in URL) will inadvertently cause their page to become invalid XML / XHTML.
TypePad isn’t alone: MovableType, Blogger, and Radio Userland all suffer from this problem. TypePad stands apart from the rest, however, because all of the templates purport to be XHTML while the service targets novices that are more likely to think & has something to do with their stereo.
We’re looking at automatically escaping content. The problem is that some users are confused when their words change, so we have to make sure the editing text looks exactly like what they entered in.
Suffice to say, I’d like to see that fixed, too. And MT users can use tag attributes to automatically encode content for XHTML validity.
I use Validable to take care of & and <blockquote> issues.
http://www.ntwizards.net/blog/2003/06/01/useful_mt_plugins.html
I tweaked my little rant to hopefully make it clear that the output should be modified, not the entry itself.