I challenged the escaped markup crowd to build a feed. No one did. Did no one notice, or did no one care? Or maybe no one succeeded?

Why shouldn't things be largely absurd, futile, and transitory? They are so, and we are so, and they and we go very well together.

—Santayana

A while back, I offered some suggestions about what to do instead of escaping markup. Near the end of that essay, I challenged the folks that are in favor of escaped markup to build a feed for two HTML documents.

The issue came up over dinner the other night and a couple of my colleagues are encouraging me to bring this up as an architectural issue before the TAG. That got me to thinking about it again and I realized that no one took up my challenge.

Did no one succeed?

Naturally, I attempted to construct the documents so that blindly wrapping their contents in CDATA sections would produce a broken feed. The point I wanted to make was that doing escaped markup correctly is more effort than it appears to be at first. Hopefully, it would follow fairly straightforwardly from there that doing it right would be roughly the same amount of effort. And it wouldn’t be broken and dangerous.

To my mind at least, that would be an improvement.

Comments:

As there was no takers, I took a shot on a whim.

Posted by Randy Morin on 26 Nov 2003 @ 04:12am UTC #
Add a comment or subscribe to (existing and future) comments on this essay.
Name:
Email*:
 *Please provide your real email address; it will not be displayed as part of the comment.
Homepage:
Comment**:
 **The following markup may be used in the body of the comment: a, abbr, b, br, code, em, i, p, pre, strong, and var. You can also use character entities. Any other markup will be discarded, including all attributes (except href on a). Your tag soup will be sanitized...