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The author of this post is a bozo, doing any (or not doing any) of the suggested things does not guarantee well formed XML. Disregarding whole sections of the X

The author of this post is a bozo, doing any (or not doing any) of the suggested things does not guarantee well formed XML. Disregarding whole sections of the XML spec, prescribing a certain way to generate xml are more harmful than not. Can text templates generate well formed xml, absolutely. Can tools generate non-well formed xml, absolutely.

wbkang 10y ago
> Making mistakes with them is extremely easy and taking all cases into account is hard. He states why right there. He doesn't say anywhere whether templates can or cannot generate well-formed xml.
- hsivonen 10y ago
  (I'm the author of the article.) Today, it's clear that text/html has won over application/xhtml+xml and JSON has won over XML for most (non-enterprise) non-document uses. But back around 2003..2009, there was no shortage of people who advocated in favor of XML and got it wrong when writing it by hand or when generating it with text-based templates. Philip Taylor (not to be confused with Philip TAYLOR) was one of the regulars on the #whatwg IRC channel around 2007..2009. He had a hobby of trying to get XML advocates' systems to produce ill-formed output. He pretty much succeeded every time. IIRC, he even found a bug in Validator.nu's XML output, even though Validator.nu practices what I preach in the article. The easy way was to supply user input that contained U+FFFE and watch the output blow up with the Yellow Screen of Death when U+FFFE was echoed as-is. Unless you have a templating system designed with the warts of XML in mind, this will happen. (A proper XML serializer has to scrub the characters that aren't allowed in XML, as seen in https://hg.mozilla.org/projects/htmlparser/file/dd08dec8acb7/src/nu/validator/htmlparser/sax/XmlSerializer.java#l419 https://hg.mozilla.org/projects/htmlparser/file/dd08dec8acb7... .) He even found a bug in Tim Bray's code that was written to make the point that it's possible to generate XML correctly... (https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-archive/2009Mar/0060.html https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-archive/2009Mar/006...)

wbkang 10y ago

> Making mistakes with them is extremely easy and taking all cases into account is hard. He states why right there. He doesn't say anywhere whether templates can or cannot generate well-formed xml.

hsivonen 10y ago
(I'm the author of the article.) Today, it's clear that text/html has won over application/xhtml+xml and JSON has won over XML for most (non-enterprise) non-document uses. But back around 2003..2009, there was no shortage of people who advocated in favor of XML and got it wrong when writing it by hand or when generating it with text-based templates. Philip Taylor (not to be confused with Philip TAYLOR) was one of the regulars on the #whatwg IRC channel around 2007..2009. He had a hobby of trying to get XML advocates' systems to produce ill-formed output. He pretty much succeeded every time. IIRC, he even found a bug in Validator.nu's XML output, even though Validator.nu practices what I preach in the article. The easy way was to supply user input that contained U+FFFE and watch the output blow up with the Yellow Screen of Death when U+FFFE was echoed as-is. Unless you have a templating system designed with the warts of XML in mind, this will happen. (A proper XML serializer has to scrub the characters that aren't allowed in XML, as seen in https://hg.mozilla.org/projects/htmlparser/file/dd08dec8acb7/src/nu/validator/htmlparser/sax/XmlSerializer.java#l419 https://hg.mozilla.org/projects/htmlparser/file/dd08dec8acb7... .) He even found a bug in Tim Bray's code that was written to make the point that it's possible to generate XML correctly... (https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-archive/2009Mar/0060.html https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-archive/2009Mar/006...)