> Maybe it would be more educational if someone could describe how these
> tags might have been built.
> 
> I'm assuming they are using a .net platform that has been horribly
> hacked. Maybe I shouldn't throw blame immediately at .net, but I have
> noticed similar things with them.
> 
> Should the CMS have translated all of the xml stuff into an action or
> content? Is it just bad code?
> 

It's just bad code. They're almost certainly using Apache Cocoon to
aggregate a bunch of XML formats together, but they haven't written
their XSLT to strip namespaces or tags. This was the same problem that
tvnz.co.nz faced when it launched their Apache Cocoon site.

The problem they're facing is that they've got XML coming from all kinds
of sources, Eg, they might have a content repository providing XML like

<content xmlns="c_repo">
        <section>
                <title>Some title</title>
                <para>Some content</para>
        </section>
</content>

And they'll combine that with a couple of RSS feeds, some XHTML, and
maybe some search engine results, and end up with a lot of XML
namespaces and non-XHTML tags. This is no bad thing, provided they go to
the effort of cleaning it up into XHTML.

They could put another stage in their pipeline to filter the namespaces
and such with some XSLT and using <xsl:stylesheet
exclude-result-prefixes=" ... ">

Cleaning the result up into XHTML as the final stage in the pipeline
though is messy, and generally it's better to write wrappers around all
the XML you're aggregating, convert this to XHTML, and then keep a
simple sitemap that just aggregates these wrappers together.



.Matthew Cruickshank
http://holloway.co.nz/

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