Semicolon better than ampersand as the default separator

Dear WG,

Pardon the cross-posting, but I'm not sure to which list this should go.

In XForms 1.1 PR the default of the separator attribute was changed to ampersand. Semicolon is a viable and fairly common alternative whose main advantage over ampersand is that it doesn't need escaping in XML and SGML.  See also [1] and [2]. Worse even, authors often fail to escape it, which results in errors. I'd like to ask you to reconsider this change and I'd rather see it reverted.

Best regards,

Krzysztof Maczyński
Invited Expert, HTML WG

[1] http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/MatrixURIs
[2] http://xmltoday.org/content/dancing-naked-streets-madman-takes-html-5#comment-2240
(Not what you might expect having read that URI.)

Received on Monday, 19 October 2009 21:06:23 UTC