On Sat, Jan 10, 2009 at 8:51 PM, Murray <planetthoughtful@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Interesting, I've never seen this presented as an issue of ethics before. I > think I can see your point, but I'd suggest that there's an interplay of > ethical obligations between a user and the host / creator of an application > in which perhaps the user should or in many cases has to accept a > de-prioritised ethical consideration. > > For example, I would guess that a user doesn't have the right to expect an > application to perform exactly to his or her expectations, regardless of > what they might be. So, I wouldn't consider myself ethically obligated to > work out how to accept 3gb of text from a POSTed form without truncating / > modifying that text due to practical limitations of my application. (not > suggesting this is a possible real-world example). > > But still, an interesting observation! > > M is for Murray > > > On Sat, Jan 10, 2009 at 6:36 AM, Daniel Brown <danbrown@xxxxxxx> wrote: > >> Well, of course you have the _right_ to do it --- as long as it's >> legal, and it's not something that *requires* the data to remain >> unaltered, you have the right to do manipulate it however you want. >> The question comes down to ethics and in predicting the preferences of >> the user. >> > I don't see any problem with accepting html/xhtml/xml in an input area. I do it all the time with FCKEditor. You can argue that it is nice because you can use things like htmlpurifier to keep it sane while also not having to invent weird things to give the input structure/looks. Also being able to parse it with simplexml/domdocument is useful too in a lot of cases. One easy way to get around the problem with "modifying" the user input, just give the user a preview of what you've done. They can then decide whether or not it is acceptable. -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
