Re: Status of Bugzilla Bug 10, Round-tripping various information in properties

Wilfredo wrote on 12/22/2005 09:50:47 PM:
> > A property value serialized as #PCDATA (thus as escaped XML) is 
> > something else than a property value serialized as XML. If you 
> > control the format, such as when you define the property in a spec, 
> > you sure have the freedom to say it's text, instead of XML. But 
> > this requires that senders and recipients agree on that. But in 
> > general, a client doesn't have that choice.
> 
>    If you define the property, senders and receivers always have to 
> agree to honor your definition.  That's not unique here.  To me 
> that's an argument for saying that such definitions SHOULD use #PCDATA.

I agree that if the property definer defines the property value as being
escaped XML text, then all clients that read that property will know that
they have to explicitly apply their XML parser to the property value
(after the PROPFIND body has been parsed once by their WebDAV client 
library),
and that all clients that write that property will know that they have to
explicitly serialize their XML and wrap it with a #PCDATA wrapper).

My point was just that this decision has to be made by the property 
definer, not by individual clients, so that all property readers
and writers know that they have to explicitly do the parsing and
unparsing, i.e. you can't have one client deciding it is going to
escape the XML to preserve namespaces, and other clients not doing so.

But also note that all you've really done is pushed the problem to the 
client,
because now each client has to be sure to use a prefix-preserving parser
when they parse the string, and use a prefix-preserving serializer
when they serialize the XML for insertion in the #PCDATA. 

Cheers,
Geoff