Henri Sivonen wrote:
On Jan 26, 2005, at 23:46, Tim Bray wrote:
On Jan 26, 2005, at 1:31 PM, Henri Sivonen wrote:
But if you can always substitute type='TEXT' with type='XHTML' but not the other way round, what's the point of having type='TEXT' in the spec?
With type='TEXT' you know it's not going to contain any (X)HTML formatting, so you don't have to invoke your (X)HTML renderer.
Is it useful to support that kind of optimization on the format level? I would expect a feed renderer to use the same rendering approach for all titles for visual consistency. Even if a renderer chose to make optimizations, surely it could check for element children itself (which would be more robust than trusting the feed generator).
I'm not so concerned about the optimization. But having observed quite a number of people tripping over double escaping rules in various flavors of RSS, I very much like having a very conservative default of TEXT. And then for those who wish to get more adventurous, there are two choices: XHTML (compact, clear, but must be well formed), and double escaped HTML (verbose, error prone, but can handle arbitrary content).
- Sam Ruby
