Re: several messages

On Mon, 1 Jun 2009, Julian Reschke wrote:
> 
> You are making something "valid" which makes parsing href attributes 
> significantly harder, and which increases the risk of these kinds of 
> references leaking into other formats.

Actually no, this didn't involve any differences to the parsing rules at 
all. The only difference was to conformance checkers, and the difference 
was minimal. This change in no way increased the complexity for UAs that 
do not do conformance checking.


> The only reason you have given was hearsay about reducing the size of 
> certain documents; I have mentioned other ways that reduce the size more 
> significantly, one of which could be deployed right away.

The reason to do this change is that authors make this mistake all the 
time and yet it is not harmful. By making this change the only practical 
effect is that authors will get fewer useless annoying errors out of 
conformance checkers.


> > Supporting both '&' and ';' seems like a exercise in bug creation. 
> > Parsing URIs is hard enough to do right as it is without making things 
> > even more complicated and adding even more edge cases.
> 
> But that's exactly what you are doing, except here it applies to parsing 
> href attributes, not URIs.

No, no change to the parsing rules was involved here.


On Mon, 1 Jun 2009, Kornel wrote:
> 
> This syntax has never been conforming before, and yet documents with 
> unescaped &s in URLs are very common, so keeping it as a conformance 
> error is unlikely to fix the problem in the future.

Indeed.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Monday, 1 June 2009 19:34:05 UTC