The BBC regresses almost three years

A little under three years ago, I wrote a blog post asking why some blogs on the BBC website had the full content of the post in their RSS feed while others only have a short excerpt.

It was spotted by Jem Stone who posted this comment:

All the blogs on the BBC should now be (we switched over this PM) full article feeds. Anything else we can do for you let us know!

and there was much rejoicing.

Today a whole bunch of blogs from key news correspondents changed which platform they were published on. This includes Mark Easton, Nick Robinson, Robert Peston and Rory Cellan-Jones. They do still have an RSS feed, even if it is harder to find as the tag that would tell a browser where it is is missing so you have to find it in the clutter of the header manually, but the feeds are back to only having summaries.

So for example this 1000 word post is represented in the RSS feed by just 18

A geographic divide in social care has been revealed by a BBC survey, but why does it exist?

There has already been speculation that this move has been to make life easier for those concerned, but it surely can’t have been a conscious decision to make life harder for the end users of the site?

Can lightning strike twice?

This time last year, after trying via a web feedback form to ask the BBC a loaded question about their RSS feeds I posted it on this blog and got a prompt and positive answer from Jem Stone.
Today I am going to try the same with the Guardian and blog something that I have sent to their user help email address but so far have had no response to. As you will see if you read the slightly dull and geeky details later on I don't actually think the issue is their fault; but as things stand I feel it is more likely (despite this blogging platform being owned by google and them being quite good at searching for content on the internet) that this will reach people with the power to make changes at the Guardian than in Mountain View.

My problem is due to how much information I try and absorb on the move, sometimes on a netbook (as I am now, it is far easier to type on than my E71) but mostly on my phone. My browser of choice is Opera Mini, my aggregator is Google Reader and a number of the feeds I read, especially to do with politics and liberty are from the Guardian.

I am gettting an XML parsing fail looking at Guardian feeds, looking at the source the error shows that in the conversion of the encoded html in the <description> element. One out of Google Reader or Opera Mini is seeing '&lt;p style="clear:both" /&gt;' not recognising that it is self closed, deciding that it needs to add an extra closing p tag, and therefore breaking the parse.
As I have little in the way of web development tools on my phone I can only speculate that it is Google that is doing the insertion (as it would be strange bug for Opera to do so then choke on it).

As I said above I fully understand that this isn't technically the Guardian's problem since their feed validates as is but I am also hoping that it is a simple change for them to the template used for RSS presentation that can fix this issue for me and anyone else in my predicament.

If you are from the Guardian and reading this, thank you in advance for any help!