Hi Robin!
Robin Redeker schrieb:
Why at all do these characters have to be escaped?
I guess because many people did implement their own broken XML parsers
in the past and many couldn't handle real XML, so they enforced escaping
that character for the backward compatibility. (just a guess)
I can't beleave that there are any such problems. There is already
software producing XML, that is valid but not escaping all possible
characters.
Examples for this are jabberd2 (but to a very new SVN version), jadc2s
(up to today), Psi (still not escaping " and ' in text nodes).
So there is out many software, that worked for years now, but
introducing this unneccessary restricting in RFC 3920 made them broken.
If you use expat you could get the original string from a text node
and look for a '>' in that string. But this is an ugly hack that I also
consider unneccessary.
How do I do this with expat? I have never seen something like this. At
least normally expat is a SAX parser, that you set an
CharacterDataHandler. And the function you register as the
CharacterDataHandler gets passed unescaped UTF-8 data. Within the
CharacterDataHandler I see now way to determine if a > has been
transfered as > or as >.
The RFC should be fixed and software that doesn't parse unescaped > in
text nodes should be fixed (noone is forced in todays world to write his
own XML parser, libxml2 (afaik) and expat (for sure) can be convinced to
handle partial transferred XML documents these days).
Yes ... I'd also say that because of reusing standards and
implementations of them, we should not force software to not accept
unescaped entities. We should even encourage software to accept these
unescaped entities.
Matthias
