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

From
Joshua Allen <>
To
"Simon St.Laurent" <>,
Date
2003-03-31T22:50:05Z
ID
<>
Thread
RE: [xml-dev] If XML is too hard for a programmer, perhaps he'd b e better off as a crossing guard
> That the application is dumb to expect exclusively text, with no
> provision for markup.

OK

> >Even more importantly, do you *really* want your <b></b> tags to be
> >hanging out with no namespace?  What will you do when your "markup"
> >contains something like "<p><br>"?
> 
> Well, actually, that's precisely how we write the stories on
> xmlhack.com, and there's this little bit of code that checks your
markup
> for well-formedness when you enter it.  This isn't rocket science.

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.  

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.