http://norman.walsh.name/2003/11/17/challenge 6 113 2003-11-17 $Date: 2005-09-11 10:27:02 -0400 (Sun, 11 Sep 2005) $ Norman Walsh 2003 Norman Walsh 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? Santayana Santayana 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. 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.