Question I have wondered about: Is it a good practice to put html in a text field, then (eg. via php) when the marked-up text renders in a user's browser it's good looking html. If not, then I'd just sandwitch field content in a <p></p> when it's rendered. Though, seems like it would mess-up fulltext searching in a marked-up text field(?). Thanks. Lee G.
I'd say that in general, it's best to avoid storing markup with text, because (1) as you say, it could mess up fulltext search statistics, and (2) it makes it more complex to repurpose that data - eg; export it to PDF instead of HTML. It's best to keep rendering separate from content.
If you *need* to store formatting information, you might be better off saving it in a more general format like XML or even SGML. If you had to do a lot of that, and search it, you might be better off using an XML database, though. I suppose that you could twiddle with MySQL's fulltext search parameters (min. word length, stop words, etc) to get it to ignore embedded HTML/XML/SGML, though.
steve
+------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Steve Edberg [EMAIL PROTECTED] | | Database/Programming/SysAdmin (530)754-9127 | | University of California, Davis http://pgfsun.ucdavis.edu/ | +---------------------- Gort, Klaatu barada nikto! ----------------------+
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