Escaped HTML discussion
An update from yesterday's position, based on feedback.
There are three forms of expressing content. Illustrated by example:
<content><em>foo</em></content><content><escaped><em>foo</em></escaped></content><content><base64>PGVtPmZvbzwvZW0+</base64></content>
Rationale:
- In my experience, people don't read specs carefully, instead they view source and emulate. And when they emulate content that is escaped without a clear signal, they emulate poorly.
- I'd like to get to the point where the original functionality
of the RSS 0.90 link tag can be achieved with the xpath
expression "
//a/@href" on those feeds that have well formed HTML. - If you are a user of a recent version IE or Mozilla, you already have a validator for wellformedness.
- Making the signal an element instead of an attribute makes life easier for both tag soup regex based approaches as well as validated schema based approaches.
- Ultimately, I would like to be able to move on to discussing such things as how relative URLs are to work, and I fundamentally believe that programmatic adjustment of content which is not well formed is an unsafe proposition.
This is also captured in the EscapedHtmlDiscussion.