Re: XMP tag.

At 2001-03-27T18:37-0500, Christopher Mark Balz wrote:-

> I am perturbed to hear that the <XMP> tag might be removed from HTML.  I use
> it often to dump HTML output to a browser window - it is extremely handy.
> With only the <PRE> tag, I'd have to do a regexp operation to replace angle
> brackets, etcetera.

It already has been removed in HTML 4.0 - it was deprecated by 3.2, and
even in 2.0 it was mildly discouraged. In fact, you should still have to
escape at least some markup, since the first occurrence of </ marks the
end of the element.

> What is the current status of a tag that will allow a pure text dump to the
> browser window?

In XHTML you can use CDATA sections. (See [1] or [2].) In fact, you can
theoretically do this in HTML too, but web browsers mostly do not support
it. You still need to escape the string ']]>', but this is likely to be
less of a problem.

[1] <http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/#h-4.8>
[2] <http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml#sec-cdata-sect>


Tim Bagot

Received on Wednesday, 4 April 2001 14:42:21 UTC