Re: XHTML character entity support

John Cowan wrote:
> Henri Sivonen scripsit:
> 
>> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-archive/2009Mar/0060.html
>> http://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/XALANJ-2419
> 
> Yes, some libraries have bugs.  But that's better than the bugs that
> essentially every single program written without such a library will have:
> much easier to fix.
> 

Why would one want to make the availability of one's site critically 
dependent on not hitting those bugs given the availability of an 
alternative?

Why would one want to sink resources into an architecture that required 
XML-centric design (always use a tree model, never do string 
concatenation, religiously remove all XML-disallowed characters from any 
input, anywhere, deal with the speed hit implied by these things) given 
an alternative option? Especially given that the time spent making ones 
site XML-compliant is time that isn't spent adding features that end 
users care about.

It seems to me that draconian error handling has a very poor opportunity 
cost.

On the other hand consistent parsing with rules understandable by 
mortals is nice. I don't think anyone would want a language with foster 
parenting or the adoption agency if it wasn't really needed for 
compatibility. Doing XML:the good bits ("XML5") seems like a no-brainer 
if it can give you the best of both approaches.

Received on Thursday, 12 November 2009 15:16:35 UTC