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Re: rss regularis(z)ation

• To: Joe English <jenglish@f...>, xml-dev@l...
• Subject: Re: rss regularis(z)ation
• From: Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@m...>
• Date: Tue, 22 Jul 2003 22:53:31 -0400
• In-reply-to: <200307230205.h6N25dN27194@d...>
• References: <001701c35029$acc504a0$2001a8c0@bryans><200307230205.h6N25dN27194@d...>

At 7:05 PM -0700 7/22/03, Joe English wrote:

>I found escaped HTML in RSS to be mostly an aesthetic problem
>(in that it deeply offends my aesthetic sensibilities :-),
>but not too hard to process.

There are real problems here. It cannot be processed with off the 
shelf XML tools. You can't run XSLT on it for example, because XSLT 
has no way to reparse part of the content. This embedded markup is 
just not a design pattern XML was ever intended to handle.

>  Feed the element content into
>a tag-soup parser, infer start- and end- tags to turn it into
>a tree, and strip out all the elements you don't want showing up
>in the aggregator output.  Took me about two hours to code this up
>(to be fair, I did use an off-the shelf lexer for the first step).

If you need to write your own tag soup parser, it ain't XML. That's 
too much work for a job that shouldn't be necessary in the first 
place.
-- 

   Elliotte Rusty Harold
   elharo@m...
   Processing XML with Java (Addison-Wesley, 2002)
   http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xmljava
   http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0201771861/cafeaulaitA

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