RE: [xsl] Fwd: Parsing Entities

["Michael Kay" <mike@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> My question is that what is so bad and stupid about using d-o-e
> (disable-output-escaping).
> I have an application that has some data that includes html tags in it
> and this works quite nicely with d-o-e as far as I can see.

The problem with d-o-e is an architectural one. It requires some out-of-band
communication between the transformation engine and the serializer, because
the interface between the two no longer consists simply of a document plus a
set of serialization parameters. This means that it stops working if you try
to decouple the transformation from the serialization, for example if you
want to pass the output of the transformation straight to another process
without serializing it. Like anything else that violates an architectural
boundary, you don't notice there's a problem until you want to change your
system in some way to deploy its existing components in a different
configuration.

To be less airy-fairy about it, the practical consequence of the above is
that your code won't work in Mozilla.

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/