[uf-discuss] a question about concatenation and hAtom entry content

[Ciaran McNulty]

On 6/1/07, Brian Suda <brian.suda at gmail.com> wrote:
> --- maybe that is a good thing, if i am converting hFeed into
> something that is NOT html, say MySQL statements, or a simple CSV
> list. Should it have the HTML mark-up or should the app be allowed it
> to be 'down-cast' to simple ASCII? is this a spec issue?

I don't think it's a spec issue at all.

Nearly ALL* of the fields in hAtom are going to be (X)HTML  (for
instance entities will be escaped) and if the consuming application
needs them in a specific text format then it's up to the application
to determine how/why it should downconvert them to text.

The hCard-Parsing wiki describes a recommended method[1] for
converting (X)HTML to plaintext, but I'm dubious about whether it's
particularly within the Microformats domain (I wouldn't argue it's not
useful!).  If we do want a generic recommendation for how to parse
HTML into text, it's a good place to start.

-Ciaran McNulty

* I'm thinking the exceptions are that that dates are ISO8601 and that
category names will be rel-tag and therefore RFC3986 encoded

[1] http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard-parsing
#Plain_Text_Formatting_of_Structural.2FSemantic_HTML