Re: [xsl] generating numerical character entities in html output

[Wendell Piez <wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Rosella,

At 07:16 AM 1/18/2005, you wrote:
> I'm starting to suspect so. I have other means to deal with that, so my 
> interest for solving the problem in xslt is sort of speculative. Anyway 
> whatever "@" is, an "entity" or a "reference" or anything else, it 
> *should* be possible to generate it so the impossibility or difficulty in 
> doing it should be considered something of a "bug" of xslt. I can live 
> with that :-) but it's a pity anyway.

You might consider it a bug, but we true-blue XSLTers might think that's 
like saying a fork is a spoon with a bug. XSLT was designed so you didn't 
have to think about things like this in the general case -- which is very 
nice, in the general case.

Your requirement is special ... or was thought to be, before it was 
understood how manifold are XSLT's applications and how many things people 
would be trying to do with it. XSLT 2.0 fills many of those gaps.

If it were me, I'd skip the disguising-as-character-references technique 
(as only a temporary fix before the spammers catch up) and find a more 
robust way to hide the emails. But it's a tricky problem, to which there's 
no perfect solution, since the requirement is to hide the addresses from 
some "users" while showing it to others -- without being able to tell who's 
who. This leaves me sympathetic to the approach that disguises my@xxxxxxxxx 
as "my at email dot com" (which you could do in XSLT 2.0 or in any number 
of other ways), though the spambots may be reading that now, too. But any 
approach that lets legitimate users click through to get an email also 
exposes the email address to the others. So it's ultimately a social 
problem without a technical fix.

Yet it's an interesting problem to think about, and no doubt you'll come up 
with something.

Cheers,
Wendell


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Wendell Piez                            mailto:wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Mulberry Technologies, Inc.                http://www.mulberrytech.com
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