Re: Unable to round-trip tab character using XMLHttpRequest and XMLSerializer

Mark A. Ziesemer wrote:
> I'm fine with "very simple" and "easy to use", but then it should work 
> by default - even for the not-so-common but within-spec cases.  Without 
> any options to set, it seems impossible to call it a configuration/usage 
> issue.  The fact that it uses some character entities (e.g. "&") but 
> not others seems to be a little bit of an issue.

You have to use & to get well-formed XML out, basically.  The default 
serialization mode is to use as few entities as possible while still producing a 
correct and valid serialization of the DOM.

If this process is lossy for the tab character in XML because the XML parser 
normalizes away literal tabs, then a bug should be filed on changing how it's 
handled.

> I'm open to using an alternate serialization method

For what you're doing, why not just serialize directly into a text file?  It 
doesn't sound like you're starting with XML, right?  So why try to shoehorn your 
data into XML, with its funny whitespace rules?

Alternately, you could base64-encode your data to eliminate any 
possibly-problematic characters.

> Unfortunately, your suggestion to use nsIDocumentEncoder seems much 
> easier said than done.  Searching for "nsIDocumentEncoder" or even 
> "DocumentEncoder" on the MDC Wiki currently yields 0 results.

You can't use it from script in Firefox 2 anyway.  I keep forgetting that not 
everyone is working against the trunk...

-Boris