Today, another developer was talking to me about how he addressed an issue he was working on. The solution he found was to stick a string of escaped XML into the attribute of another XML element. In my head I was screaming "Is that even safe and wise to do???". According to him, that has been done on tons of other projects within the company that transmit XML back and forth.
My question is this -
- Is that a safe/smart thing to do (xml in an xml attribute)?
- If not, should I bring that up? I have only been with the company for 2 years and have noticed many things that are just asking for a major catastrophe to happen someday (both in and not in projects I work on). I don't want to be the one that always says that they are doing things wrong...
Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated!
FYI - UPDATED INFO RE: APPLICATION - Flash is calling this API and parsing the XML it gets in the response. I do not think the Flash is using XPath or anything, just string parsing (but I could be wrong). I do not work on the Flash aspect, so I do not know where to look (nor would I understand it).