Bug #1758: Too much entity-escaping in Atom feed titles

Just noticed this while viewing the tweets Atom feed in Mail.app:

  <entry>
    <id>tag:wincent.dev,2008:tweets/525</id>
    <published>2010-12-08T11:04:26Z</published>
    <updated>2010-12-08T11:04:26Z</updated>
    <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://wincent.dev/twitter/525"/>
    <title>Just found the &amp;quot;Pitfalls&amp;quot; page on the nginx wiki, which has a bunch...</title>
    <content type="html">&lt;p&gt;Just found &lt;a href="http://wiki.nginx.org/Pitfalls" class="external"&gt;the &amp;quot;Pitfalls&amp;quot; page&lt;/a&gt; on the &lt;a href="/wiki/nginx"&gt;nginx&lt;/a&gt; wiki, which has a bunch of tips for improving the efficiency, correctness and security of your config file.&lt;/p&gt;
</content>
  </entry>

The title field is showing up with a visible " entity in Mail.app, instead of an actual quote symbol. Looking at the feed source you can see that the actual sequence in the title is ". I expect that this same bug is probably visible in other feeds in the application.

As far as I recall (not looking at the code right now), the title is not passed through the wikitext translator, so that at least isn't responsible for the entities. Whatever is responsible for the second layer of "entification", I suspect that Rails' new automatic view escaping is probably responsible for the first, transparent layer.

If that suspicion is correct, it's not the first time that I've been caught out by the behavior, as one would have expected that the auto-escaping only take place in HTML templates, not templates targeting other output formats (the related Rails ticket for that bug is Lighthouse #4858).