Author value in RSS feed is not compliant with RSS 2.0 specs.

[Emmanuel Blot]

Quoting ​RSS specification

<author> is an optional sub-element of <item>.
It's the email address of the author of the item. 

Trac fills in the author value, whatever its kind: the author name, or the email address if it exists.

Should we disable the author tag for users without an email address?

[Matthew Good]

Replying to eblot:

Trac fills in the author value, whatever its kind: the author name, or the email address if it exists.

Should we disable the author tag for users without an email address?

AFAICT it already only includes emails, not simply names:

    if:event.author.email ?>
     <author><?cs var:event.author.email ?></author><?cs
    /if ?>

Am I missing something?

[Emmanuel Blot]

Replying to mgood:

Am I missing something?

For timeline_rss.cs, you're right. However, for the other RSS sources, you can find:

$ grep -i '<author>' templates/*
templates/log_rss.cs:     if:change.author ?><author><?cs var:change.author ?></author><?cs
templates/query_rss.cs:     <author><?cs var:result.reporter ?></author><?cs
templates/report_rss.cs:   <?cs if:author ?><author><?cs var:author ?></author><?cs /if ?>
templates/ticket_rss.cs:    if:change.author ?><author><?cs var:change.author ?></author><?cs
templates/timeline_rss.cs:     <author><?cs var:event.author.email ?></author><?cs

change.author, for example, produces an invalid feed.

[Christian Boos]

Note also that in various places in the code, the value of change.author will actually depend on the format used (i.e. it's often special cased for RSS). That's a bit error prone, for sure, but I wouldn't invest too much time on that, as we can use the migration to Genshi as an opportunity to improve this (like calling the author validation code directly from the .rss templates).

[Christian Boos]

I believe it works correctly for 0.11 now. If someone can identify an issue with <author>, please reopen with the relevant information (Trac server and RSS client version information, sample RSS output…)