All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

recipe of the day

gav on 2002-06-04T03:42:20

I don't own a recipe book, I just like to make things up as I go along. However this worked out quite well tonight:

  • heated wok with some olive oil
  • 1/2 diced red onion
  • couple of mini bella mushrooms
  • 1 habenero pepper, de-seeded and diced
  • handful of thin cut steak
  • dash of salt, some black pepper
  • bit of soy sauce
  • a squirt of honey
Served in a basil wrap. Absolutely fabulous. Cooking is a piece of cake if you have great ingredients to work with.

<rant>

From random web browsing that started here and ended up here:

Here's an example of a link element that Radio's aggregator understands:

<link rel="alternate" type="text/xml" title="XML" href="http://www.scripting.com/rss.xml">

In order for it to work it must be formatted in exactly this way. It's totally brutal. If the attributes aren't all present, it fails. If they aren't in the correct order, it fails. If the whitespace isn't exactly as above, it fails. If the attributes aren't quoted, it fails.

Why is it so rigid? Writing an HTML parser is a big job, we had to write a simple one for this feature, it's utterly clueless about the power of HTML, by design. ;->

Gah! If you are going to write a HTML parser do it right! Every time I see something like this I am thankful for CPAN and modules like HTML::TreeBuilder and HTML::Parser. With tools this powerful you don't have these issues.

</rant>

fin