Re: Mason2: no default HTML escaping

On Mar 6, 2012, at 5:18 PM, Paul Wallingford wrote:

> On 3/6/2012 4:11 PM, Jonathan Swartz wrote:
>> I hear your concerns. So I'm not sure which of these you are suggesting:
>> 1) Substitution tags should be HTML-escaped by default in Mason.
>> 2) DefaultFilter should be implemented and documented in core Mason, so that it doesn't require a separate plugin install.
>> 
>> #1 is hard to do because Mason is supposed to be content-type agnostic - usable for HTML generation but also other kinds of content generation.
>> 
>> #2 is more reasonable.
>> 
> 
> Here is a question to ponder.
> 
> Mason, it seems, was born originally with the idea in mind for 
> generating web pages.  Tools that are generic have their place, but so 
> do tools that specialize.  Tools that specialize can implement 
> optimizations since they do not have to consider possibilities outside 
> their specialty.  Case in point is the question of HTML filters in the 
> Mason core.
> 
> So, the question is: Has anyone used Mason for anything serious other 
> than web page generation?  If the amount of people or projects using 
> Mason that are not web based is essentially zero, it may be better to 
> add web specific features and optimizations.
> 
> I do not know the answer to this question, except my own experience, 
> which is that 100% of my Mason projects are for the web.

I use Mason to generate httpd and other conf files at work.

You're probably correct, though, that 99% of Mason's use is in generating web content. However, that isn't always HTML pages; I've used it to generate javscript and JSON results too, where HTML escaping would definitely be unwelcome.

So I think it's better to have a well-supported, easy way to html-escape all substitution tags than to put this in as the global default.

Jon


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