On Nov 20, 2006, at 11:35 AM, Paul Lutus wrote:

> James Edward Gray II wrote:
>
>> I've seen valid XHTML that wouldn't be much fun to parse.  You still
>> need to worry about whitespace, namespaces, the kind of quoting used,
>> CDATA sections, ...
>
> These are all relatively easy to parse. Even the CDATA sections are  
> clearly
> and consistently delimited, so can be reliably skipped over and
> encapsulated. That was the design goal of XHTML -- to be easy to  
> parse, to
> be consistent -- assuming the syntax is followed.

But if you use an already developed parser, you gain all their work  
on edge cases, all their testing efforts, all their optimization  
work, etc.

I see what you are saying about knowing you can count on the data,  
but your messages are filled with a lot "as long as you are sure"  
conditions.  Dropping a bunch of those conditions is just one more  
advantage to using a library.

You say you are always surprised when people build up all this hefty  
library code when a simple regex will do, but I'm always shocked when  
I can replace hundreds of lines of code by loading and making use of  
a library.  If we have to err on one side of that, I would prefer it  
be on the library using side.

That said, I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree.  That's for  
the intelligent and civil debate.

James Edward Gray II