Like Ovid, I have broken every one of those rules, and more. (Personally, I love playing with soft references in production code, but I'm masochistic.) But, I will follow those rules in 99.9% of my code. The point is that most programmers shouldn't parse HTML with regexes most of the time. Heck, most shouldn't do it all of the time. And, if you do it, it should be modularized, packaged, and then never messed with again. :-)

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We are the carpenters and bricklayers of the Information Age.

The idea is a little like C++ templates, except not quite so brain-meltingly complicated. -- TheDamian, Exegesis 6

Please remember that I'm crufty and crochety. All opinions are purely mine and all code is untested, unless otherwise specified.