Re: Advice on making IRI document suitable for reference by HTML (and other specs)

Anne van Kesteren wrote:
> On Tue, 29 Dec 2009 01:33:46 +0100, Roy T. Fielding <fielding@gbiv.com> 
> wrote:
>> No.  Some of those definitions aren't even useful inside HTML5
>> because the attribute string has to be parsed for whitespace
>> issues based on the definition of that attribute -- there is
>> no single attribute parser algorithm for HTML.
> 
> Actually, since HTML5 (and in implementations for much longer) there is. 
> And there is no whitespace normalization.

Does that imply that nobody implements a/@ping correctly? (which takes a 
whitespace-separated list)

>>> I looked through the HTML5 specification for any specific reference
>>> to WEBADDRESS or HTML5 section 2.5, and saw no such attributes;
>>> could you give an example of an HTML5 attribute which requires a
>>> list of space-separated references?
>>
>> rel="", itemprop="", and potentially any attribute that consists
>> of an undefined set of space-separated tokens (token syntax is
>> only restricted to exclude space).
> 
> It's not clear to me whether allowing spaces in Web references/IRIs (as 
> opposed to requiring implementations to handle them) is a good idea, but 
> surely specific contexts could impose limitations on the Web 
> reference/IRI syntax. E.g. disallowing spaces in them because the value 
> will first be split on spaces.

Sure. We can reverse the decision we made a few years ago. It would make 
certain uses of references which are currently invalid (according to 
HTML5) valid, and it would also break some specs that rely on whitespace 
as separator.

Doesn't sound like an enhancement to me.

Best regards, Julian

Received on Wednesday, 30 December 2009 14:24:54 UTC