Re: Enhydra: Displaying HTML text stored in a database

[Mark Diekhans <markd@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Chad!

chad fowler <chadfowler@xxxxxxxxx> writes:
> We've all seen this thread of discussion over and over again.  Every time,
> someone dutifully issues the "this is a hack" warning.  Being the
> conscientious guy that I am, I always prefer to avoid "hacks" whenever
> possible.  

Its a `hack' in terms of the design of the DOM.  HTML/XML are structured
documents.  In the textual representation, markup tags are used to
represent the structure of the document.  When a document is parsed
and stored in the DOM, the structure is now represented as objects.
Using CDATASection to hold unparsed HTML mixes the two representations
in a non-standard way.  This is enabled by the fact that CDATASection
is only valid for XML, not HTML.  To any tool that understands the DOM,
this just forms a blob of text with no interpretation.


> But, the truth of the matter is that (as you mentioned) parsing
> all of that stored content is expensive.  When I say expensive, I'm not just
> talking about performance.  It's expensive in terms of design and in terms
> of clarity (IMHO).
> 
> Being that this is such a frequently asked question, I have to know what
> *you* would do.  To hack or not to hack?

It depends on the application.  If the application involved some data
that could be pre-parsed into a structured representation (XML or RDB),
then there are many advantages of storing the data in a structured format.
However, you are probably not dealing with HTML in this cases.  If
the application is just using bit html tags as a way of enhancing the
formating of user-entered text, there is really no advantage to
attempting to parse it.  In this case, I would go with the CDATASection
hack.


Mark
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