Re: Resources for AtomPub parser validation

[Daniel Jalkut <jalkut@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Thanks everybody for trying to explain this to me. Dave - that was a  
cool idea to use a schema validation in your XML. But it seems like  
that applies more to generating the XML than to parsing it. Or do I  
misunderstand something?

Tim, thanks for your comments and for linking the RFC. It's starting  
to sink in, but I'm still cloudy-minded.

On Jun 30, 2008, at 1:16 PM, Tim Bray wrote:

> I'm a little concerned that this is bothering people who I know are  
> smart, experienced implementors.  Maybe you've stumbled on a corner  
> case?

I think you might be overestimating both my smarts and experience ;)   
Before taking over with MarsEdit I had little real world experience  
with XML, so I find myself tackling many of "the finer points" without  
the aid of any historical perspective.  I've only recently started  
getting more fine-toothed because I'm simultaneously changing parsers  
and getting more serious about the generic AtomPub support in MarsEdit.

I find "HTML in an XHTML in an XML" to be inherently confusing. But  
it's probably made worse by my lack of conviction about what format  
the content "is in" when it's being edited by my users. While MarsEdit  
is "mostly an HTML editor," it is also sort of an agnostic text  
editor. So ... to boil down the points of confusion, here's a specific  
example being cited by a customer whose AtomPub implementation I'm  
testing MarsEdit against. This is what comes over the wire:

 <content type="xhtml"><div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml";  
xml:space="preserve">
Some test HTML with an excaped ampersand in it:
<img src="foo?bar=1&amp;baz=2"/>
</div></content>

What's happening is the editor is ending up showing that &amp; as just  
a "&".  This sounds like it's right, based on what you're saying that  
the xhtml content gets unescaped by the XML parser, right?

But the customer's contention is that the &amp; should remain escaped  
in the HTML source, because that's how he typed it, and that's how it  
exists in the database on his server.

I guess it boils down to whether I should be presenting data "in  
HTML" (re-escaped?) or "literally."  Perhaps this is not a question  
that the Atom specification needs to or can answer :)

Daniel