I'm not saying he shouldn't have (I've certainly learned something I didn't know), but let's face it, posting this on StackOverflow is like handing a loaded gun

I'm not saying he shouldn't have (I've certainly learned something I didn't know), but let's face it, posting this on StackOverflow is like handing a loaded gun to a bunch of children and telling them not to pull the trigger. True, but that's the case for posting anything non-trivial where Google can find it. And isomorphic to using non-trivial programming languages or patterns in industrial programs. At a certain point, you have to let go of the idea that if you hide anything requiring thought and judgment from people, they won't hurt themselves. Some people are going to foul things up no matter what you do or don't tell them, and some will excel even if you make it hard for them to find knowledge. The interesting group are those who are open to being influenced by what you have to share. I suggest that even if only a small proportion of SO readers walk away enlightened, this article is a win. The folks who use it to justify their own failed attempts to manage arbitrary HTML with regexen would have pooched the task in some other way even if they stuck to using a parser library.