RE: [xml-dev] If XML is too hard for a programmer, perhaps he'd b e better off as a crossing guard

["Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@simonstl.com>]

joshuaa@microsoft.com (Joshua Allen) writes:
>On the one hand you have no problem using some hackish version of HTML
>that is neither XHTML nor HTML 4.0; yet you consider it an unacceptable
>hack to use CDATA.  This is the irony that puzzled me at first.  

In its final context, it's valid XHTML 1.0.  I don't particularly care
whether it's valid inside the database cell.  Validity and namespace
processing are just dandy, in their particular contexts, but much of the
time I don't give a damn about them.  I'd much rather be certain that I
can work with entity references and not have them transmogrify into
something else, even their 'proper' result, until I'm ready.

>I suppose I understand why you are doing it, though, and agree that
>tools do a bad job of supporting scenarios where you want to enter the
>raw markup directly (rather than text).  On the other hand, *some*
>tools aren't even smart enough to escape markup symbols that creep
>into text fields, and that's even more annoying.

And heck, some tools respond to a <![CDATA[..]]> in a text field by
wrapping it in a CDATA section.  I think that causes some nasty
conflicts with Section 2.4 of XML 1.0:
--------------------
The right angle bracket (>) may be represented using the string "&gt;",
and must, for compatibility, be escaped using "&gt;" or a character
reference when it appears in the string "]]>" in content, when that
string is not marking the end of a CDATA section.
---------------------

Five years in, a long way to go yet.

-- 
Simon St.Laurent
Ring around the content, a pocket full of brackets
Errors, errors, all fall down!
http://simonstl.com -- http://monasticxml.org