From: Julian Fitzell Date: 2001-11-16T03:10:47+09:00 Subject: [ruby-talk:25293] Re: ANN: REXML 1.1a3 It seems to me that we're getting ourselves a little confused here. As far as I can tell, any Ruby XML library should allow the programmer to use " or < or whatever when generating XML or when retrieving the contents of an attribute or of a tag (where the " or < is no longer ambiguous because there are no tags or other qoutes involved... it's just a string that holds one piece of data). When the library writes out the complete XML to file (or any stream) then it must escape these characters because otherwise it isn't valid XML. When reading in an XML file, it should expect " and give an error if it isn't there because, again, otherwise it isn't valid XML. The XML spec is very clearly defined and should be adhered to 100% on the external side of the library. On the internal side, we should be able to make it as convenient as possible for the programmer... if I have to pass valid XML into the library, why wouldn't I just write the XML straight to a file in the first place??? Julian On 16/11/2001 at 2:48 AM Tobias Reif wrote: >Please don't get me wrong, I don't want to stop any discussion. I just >think that all this is clearly specified in the XML spec, and won't >change through discussion. It's interesting though and fun ;) > >P.S. Even behaviour for the writer is specified the (not its' API); it >must be possible to use it to generate well-formed documents as per the >spec. > > >Tobi >-- >Tobias Reif >http://www.pinkjuice.com/myDigitalProfile.xhtml > >go_to('www.ruby-lang.org').get(ruby).play.create.have_fun >http://www.pinkjuice.com/ruby/