[qmtest] RFE: result annotations

[Stefan Seefeld]

Nathaniel Smith wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 24, 2003 at 12:56:05AM -0400, Stefan Seefeld wrote:
> 
>>Mark Mitchell wrote:
>>
>>
>>>It cares when it needs to print out the string with "qmtest summarize" or
>>>when it writes out another result stream.  How would we get it back in 
>>
>>that
>>
>>>case?
>>
>>I'd expect the python xml module to provide a way to serialize nodes similar
>>to xslt's <xsl:copy-of>. I'll look into it and try to come up with a little
>>patch as a proof of concept. Then you can see whether it fits your needs.
> 
> 
> Do we even know that annotations are, in general, proper XHTML?
> We've documented them as being HTML (though they're not even properly
> treated as that ATM; we don't handle character entities right at all),
> and HTML in real life is rarely well-formed XML.  I'm worried that if
> we start parsing it as XML, we'll start getting parse errors
> who-knows-where...

Yes, I agree, and I didn't mean to suggest we should 'just' treat the 
content as xhtml. Rather, I'd suggest that the requirements be that all
content has to be valid xhtml.

While it would be possible to keep it the way it is now, i.e. treat the
content as text, that makes postprocessing of the data hard:

It means that to recover any structure (markup) I have first to strip
off the metadata from qmtest (xslt with output method 'text'), then
reinterpret this 'text' as html. But that is pretty cumbersome as
to interpret that html I'd need the metadata I just stripped off !

Stefan