[Bug 9352] Make unescaped & conforming in attribute values in some cases

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=9352


Ian 'Hixie' Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
         Depends on|                            |9351
             Status|NEW                         |ASSIGNED




--- Comment #2 from Ian 'Hixie' Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>  2010-04-02 06:50:56 ---
> However, for an author to be aware of this kind of error, they must be
> regularly using a conformance checker (or equivalently, a tool that ensures
> conformance at the output stage). Then the conformance checker can tell them if
> they have used a construct that actually will be interpreted as an entity
> reference, rather than merely one that might be, if edited.

This is incorrect. It is possible for an author to be aware of this error due
to regular usage of a validator but to still write markup that is not tested by
a validator. For instance, I am an example of such an author: I run the
validator every time I edit the HTML5 spec, but I almost never use the
validator otherwise. Making this an error means that authors are more likely to
always use the right style, even on projects where they don't use the
validator.

Making the mistake with a real entity such as "amp" or "copy" can be really
hard to track down, especially with long URLs with lots of query parameters.
Unless we change how such strings are parsed, we are not doing authors any
favours by hiding this problem. Good practices here are a huge aid to reducing
problems in real work, and we should be encouraging those practices.

(I'm not closing this yet; I'll revisit this once I've addressed bug 9351.)


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Received on Friday, 2 April 2010 06:51:00 UTC