A critique of cgi.escape

[Jon Ribbens]

In article <4517ec24$0$13947$edfadb0f at dread15.news.tele.dk>, Max M wrote:
>> I'm sorry, that's not good enough. How, precisely, would it break
>> "existing code"? Can you come up with an example, or even an
>> explanation of how it *could* break existing code?
> 
> Some examples are:
> 
> - Possibly any code that tests for string equality in a rendered 
> html/xml page. Testing is a prefered development tool these days.

Testing is good, but only if done correctly.

> - Code that generates cgi.escaped() markup and (rightfully) for some 
> reason expects the old behaviour to be used.

That's begging the question again ("an example of code that would
break is code that would break").

> - 3. party code that parses/scrapes content from cgi.escaped() markup. 
> (you could even break Java code this way :-s )

I'm sorry, I don't understand that one. What is "party code"? Code
that is scraping content from web sites already has to cope with
entities etc.

Your comment about Java is a little ironic given that I persuaded the
Java Struts people to make the exact same change we're talking about
here, back in 2002 (even if it did take 11 months) ;-)

> If you cannot think of other examples for yourself where your change 
> would introduce breakage, you are certainly not an experienced enough 
> programmer to suggest changes in the standard lib!

I'll take my own opinion on that over yours, thanks.