4 ms·
> But programming has strict rules itself and will also fail if not adhered to so I never understood the complaint of "draconian" error checking in XML/XHTML.
by gsnedders 7y ago
> But programming has strict rules itself and will also fail if not adhered to so I never understood the complaint of "draconian" error checking in XML/XHTML.
In most cases, if your code has some syntax error, the author of the code sees the syntax error; in the web case, if your code has some syntax error, the user sees the syntax error. That's the dramatic difference.
The other reality is unlike program code, there's vastly more often user content intermixed in (X)HTML and it's rare for people to implement sanitisation correctly (do you handle U+0000? U+FFFF? U+1FFFF? most people outputting XHTML historically haven't, even if they get the security critical stuff (like "<") right).
- sureaboutthis 7y agoNot true. XHTML and HTML have validators to check your markup for proper syntax and usage. You know that. You made one of them! Good writers of markup will always check with those before they ship it. In the case of user supplied markup, that's still an issue today with HTML.
- gsnedders 7y agoI've been involved with multiple HTML and XML parsers, but never validators. :) The reality ten years ago, when a number of prominent XML advocates were using XHTML (and actually using it as such, serving it as such), almost all of their sites had user input means where the input was sanitized well enough for HTML to be secure (and not have any markup injection), but not for XML well-formedness (they got all the markup injection risks in XML, but not all the other WF requirements). If the very people who claim XML is easy can't get it right, can everyone else?
- sureaboutthis 7y agoYes. It was your outliner I was thinking of, not a validator but weren't you involved with the original http://validator.w3.org/nu/ http://validator.w3.org/nu/ at least in part? I, too, served my web pages as "real" xhtml 10 years ago and loved it :)
- gsnedders 7y agoPromise I've never worked on a validator!
- sureaboutthis 7y agoWell, now I have to rewrite my book :)