HTML Tag Cleaner Fails

Bill Marriott wjm at wjm.org
Tue Aug 8 16:58:51 EDT 2006


Dar Scott wrote:
> You are assuming that a field and htmlText has something to do with  HTML.
>
> What do you base this assumption on?

Oh, I dunno, the name of the function beginning with "HTML?" The 
documentation which states, "Specifies the contents of a field, with its 
text formatting represented as HTML tags and special characters represented 
as HTML entities." And the detailed list of supported, unsupported, and 
custom HTML tags which follows?

Seriously, this is a stretch.

Consider the Rev text field the equivalent of a WAP 1.0 browser, or 
something like that. It is a bonafide HTML presentation, to the extent of 
what Rev text fields are capable of rendering. A relatively complete set of 
text formatting is available. Images are incorporated as appropriate. Links 
are handled. And so on. I assume the only reason the rendering is not more 
complete are the limitations of the field control and Rev itself.

There can be no doubt that the intention of the function is to a) export the 
styled content of a text field as faithfully as possible using HTML and b) 
to render incoming HTML as properly as possible. The <title> element is 
specifically defined in the HTML specification: "The TITLE element is not 
considered part of the flow of text."

> Stripping <title> is bizarre.

No, it's exactly the right thing to do if you're implementing a function 
named HTMLText() that is designed to process HTML tags at best-effort. 






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