Wednesday, January 14, 2004

"A Digital Maginot Line". Instapundit links to a piece on some onerous Net legislation in France. [Hit & Run] Among other things, it will oblige service providers to filter net traffic for illegal content, with criminal sanctions for companies that fail to block pedophile images, material excusing crimes against humanity and incitement to racial hatred. So in other words, French service providers would be required to censor any material that was in any way positive towards Napoleon Bonaparte, whose attempted conquest of Europe is a crime against humanity according to the Nuremberg Principle. 9:45:51 AM    comment () Should you always give the user what he or she wants? No. It would be irresponsible to do so. For example, consider doctors and antibiotics. A doctor shouldn't give you an antibiotic unless it can really do you some good, and along with the prescription should come a stern lecture about taking the full course of the drug, not stopping when you start to feel better. As a user, you may just want to feel well, and that would be understandable. But the rest of us have an interest in you not being selfish. If you stop taking the drug before all the nasty germs are killed, you're going to help create a strain of the germ that's immune to the drug. Eventually there won't be an antibiotic that works, and future generations will die from diseases that are totally curable today. So while the user may want to stop taking the drug, the doctor would be irresponsible in prescribing it if he or she felt it was likely that you wouldn't finish taking it. The same idea applies to reading bad XML files. If my code reads them, then yours has to too. Eventually the XML stops working. The reason we have XML is so we don't have to scrape HTML. If the XML becomes as hard to deal with as the HTML, then we might as well just scrape the HTML. [Scripting News] If one is going to argue that one's code shouldn't read bad XML, then perhaps one's code ought not to generate bad XML. Here is what the author of another aggregator had to say about RSS files generated by Radio: I noticed that Scripting News uses XML character entities to insert HTML tags into the RSS data: <description>&lt;a name="laa10fd0608df8456a31153446fa27979 "&gt; This is a bit strange (if not to say non-standard) and I don't see the need for this... 9:02:25 AM    comment ()

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