Re: Parsing HREFs?

On Sun, 19 Feb 2006, Frank Ellermann wrote:

> Jukka K. Korpela wrote:
>
> <http://www.htmlhelp.com/tools/validator/problems.html#amp>
>> A reference to Netscape 3.x, historically interesting as it
>> might be, does not make a document very convincing these days
>
> Okay, but it's correct.  Curious minds might try to invent wild
> and wonderful workarounds for this "&-bug", all of them failing
> miserably, not limited to my historically interesting browser.
>
> It's no "bug", it's a "feature", the historically interesting
> example tries to make this point as simple as possible for all
> readers not familiar with entities and SGML.

A person who uses a validator should be expected to know the basics of 
SGML or XML, including entities. Most of the problems that people have 
with validators have been causes by trying to use a tool they simply
cannot understand without actually learning something new. Attempts to 
help people to avoid actual learning will just make things worse.

In this particular case, an example like
"foo.cgi?chap=1&sect=2"
would be far more illustrating, since &sect is actually defined.
The point is that _any_ sequence starting with "&" followed by an 
alphanumeric character _could_ be defined in some markup language.

-- 
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

Received on Sunday, 19 February 2006 14:14:17 UTC