Talk:XML/Output
You need to separate the task description fully from the example so others can follow the description alone. --Paddy3118 19:43, 28 December 2008 (UTC)
How about extending the task by adding a 'special' name that needs escaping, such as '<None>', and ask for sample output. You would then force entries to handle escaped characters. --Paddy3118 05:15, 8 June 2009 (UTC)
- On one level that'd be good, but on another it's not so good. (XML docs aren't supposed to contain magic flag values in text nodes; that's what using a different elements is for...) —Donal Fellows 09:00, 8 June 2009 (UTC)
- Why not simply have a name in the list which includes something with a named entity, like the German "Jürgen" ("Jürgen") or the french "André" ("André")? --Ce 09:18, 8 June 2009 (UTC)
- Because those don't need to be encoded; the data stream might be UTF-8 (which is actually the default for XML...) For the quoting to work, we'd need to force the inclusion of each of
<>'"&(those are the only ones that XML requires handling, and even the quoting characters only need doing in some circumstances; it's really messy) and those characters don't look like first names. (The set of things you're supposed to quote is larger in HTML.) —Donal Fellows 10:47, 8 June 2009 (UTC)
- Because those don't need to be encoded; the data stream might be UTF-8 (which is actually the default for XML...) For the quoting to work, we'd need to force the inclusion of each of
- Why not simply have a name in the list which includes something with a named entity, like the German "Jürgen" ("Jürgen") or the french "André" ("André")? --Ce 09:18, 8 June 2009 (UTC)