What formatting can RSS readers reliably interprete?

Im making a normal RSS feed for my website. I need to include simple html formatting in the description eg paragraphs, line breaks, lists, etc. To do this I need to wrap the description content as CDATA.

The issue with this is that when I validate my feed the content of the CDATA is ignored. So although the feed validates, I dont actually know if everything is ok or not.

How can I find out what markup will likely be read ok by the various RSS readers?

Can I use whatever markup I wo开发者_StackOverflow中文版uld happily put in a website? How about inline styles? Or is more like designing html emails? Thanks

RSS files are XML Formatted plain text, I think that's the only standard you can rely upon.

I think most Syndicators look like they're handling HTML in RSS as they simply download the linked article when you choose the header.

If you're looking to embed rich content, then you may well be better investigating Atom instead of RSS.

Have a look at this S/O question: Which is better for encoding HTML for RSS?