From: "Ruth A. Kramer" <rhkramer@...>
Date: 2005-01-14T00:12:26+09:00
Subject: HTML Entitities in Instiki: was Re: [ANN] Soks - Yet Another Wiki

Alex,

Thanks for the response!  Some comments interspersed below:

Alexey Verkhovsky wrote:
> Randy Kramer wrote:
> 
> >Instiki might serve as a good learning / jumping off point.
> >
> Depends on how much programming skills you have at the moment
> (impossible for me to say, but the phrase "looked at" sort of says that
> you are a beginner - unless I am misreading you). 

Pretty much--I used to program (hobbyist level) in things like Algol,
Fortran, Pascal, and some embedded languages of various sorts, but none
of those involved objects.  (Closest to object oriented was some Visal
Basic (5 and 6) about 5 years ago.)

> If you are, Instiki
> may be a more complex piece of code than you want to deal with right
> now. See for yourself.

Ok (it will probably be a few weeks though).

> >But I have found some bugs (IMHO) and can see some things that I think
> >might be improvements.
> >
> >
> Yup, no doubt there are issues.
> 
> >The first bug, IMHO, is that HTML entities don't work as I'm used to,
> >they are not saved as HTML entities but instead are converted to the
> >"real" character, thus, for example, if you (I) want to display
> >something like <an example HTML tag>, it disappears after (iirc) the
> >next edit.
> >
> >Since I went this far, let me ask, do you see that as a major problem to
> >fix (like requiring a major rewrite of the "parsing" code, or something
> >fairly simple?
> >
> I haven't looked at the parsing code closely yet - was occupied with the
> controller. Some people who did said it needed a rewrite.

Do you (or anyone else) have any thoughts on how to approach the HTML
entity problem?  (I mentioned rewriting the "parsing" code out of
ignorance, not with any real thought that could fix the problem.)

The problem as I see it is that when a page containing an HTML entity is
saved, the HTML entity is converted to its "real" character.  E.g., &lt;
is saved as <.  To avoid the problem, it should be preserved (saved) as
the entity (&lt;).  Hmm, I guess maybe something could be done in the
parser of the nature of looking for such entities and preserving them
(avoid any further "rendering").  

I think maybe somebody is thinking about that--I forget where I saw some
discussion about the parsing and the idea of not processing portions of
the file (more than once).

PS: I'm posting this back to the list to solicit input from others.

PPS: Do you plan (or already have) a mechanism (bugzilla?) to collect
bugs / RFEs?

regards,
Randy Kramer