On 21 Jul 2005, at 7:29 pm, James Cerra wrote:
Graham,
Yes, but your proposed solution just requires people at the other end
of the chain to do the hard work. A common theme in the design of
Atom is minimizing the amount of work that must be done by publishers
(of which there are many) vs the amount of work done by processing
tools (of which there are few, and which are easier to turn into
common libraries).
You are probably correct. However...
Aren't HTML's character references harder for publishing software
to produce
compared with HTML numeric references? After all, producing
numeric references
requires a simple fast algorithm and no lookup table. Thus,
depreciating HTML
character references makes it _easier_ to publish Atom code as well.
Not if the HTML in the publishers database already contains named
references, and/or users are regularly submitting HTML that contains
named references.
The only feed producer software that probably likes HTML character
references
above all else are human hands. And if humans are writing their
feeds by hand,
then.
Feeds a generally a small facet of a much larger publishing system or
process, that yes, includes humans.
Graham
