• To: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...>,<xml-dev@l...>
• Subject: RE: If XML is too hard for a programmer, perhaps he'd b e better off as a crossing guard
• From: "Joshua Allen" <joshuaa@m...>
• Date: Mon, 31 Mar 2003 14:50:05 -0800
• Thread-index: AcL31nmxS+TTumvcQwCdmO7C8OxCpgAAJX1Q
• Thread-topic: 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.

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