Re: Disable Output Escaping - really useful

| I wrote> Any use of disable-output-encoding is _always_ a hack.
| 
| Steve Muench writes.
| > The disable-output-escaping="yes"
| > is the supported way to "pass through" these chunks of 
| > markup on the way to building a web page to deliver to
| > the browser.
| 
| Will this still work once XSL engines get embedded at the client side?
| My understanding of the process is that it shouldn't (but I suppose if
| enough people do this then the browsers will have to make it work, somehow.)
| 
| It seems to me that whatever the value of disable-output-escaping the
| result tree just contains a text node, so if you are stuffing the output
| straight into a browser, then it will not work, unless you write out the
| entire result to a file (or in memory string) and re-parse.

When the server delivers XML to the browser, it does so
(at least in the typical web server over HTTP scenario)
as a text document of MIME type "text/xml". This means
that the browser has to in any event parse what the
server is sending it if it is to make sense of the structure.
The XML isn't sent as a pre-parsed DOM tree over the "wire".

I agree that in many cases where people are thinking in terms of
"just-burp-out-an-open-tag-here-and-that'll-get-the-job-done",
rather than thinking of outputing balanced trees, then it could
be deemed a hack. However, since oftentimes what's contained
in the database columns are balanced trees of XML serialized
as text, then:

  <xsl:value-of disable-output-escaping="yes" select="DOC_FRAG"/>

is, from the point of view of what the final document being
delivered over the web, kind of like including an external
entity reference that happens to be stored in a column in the
database. Not exactly, but conceptually similar...

______________________________________________________________
Steve Muench, Lead XML Evangelist & Consulting Product Manager
Business Components for Java Dev't Team, Oracle Corporation



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