Tidying the value of an attribute?

We have come across a rather peculiar situation, which has arisen because of
a legacy inheritance from  "pre HTML" days.

An <object>, <embed> or <param> element can have an attribute such as
eg script="...script commands..."

These "legacy" script commands it turns out have some undesirable features

a) they often contain semantic line breaks. for example
 # comment
where the # starts on a new line and the comment ends with a line break

b) Even worse, the scripts can use the  < or  > operators.

Tidy of course breaks on  b), but fortunately, the  > can be replaced 
by  an entity declaration in the instance that we use (Chime). 

Its case a) that this query relates to.

Might it be possible to have a Tidy flag which would be used to 
suppress processing of the value of an attribute?  For example, a particularly
long value is currently concatenated onto a single line, with line breaks removed.
The new flag would suppress this.

Or is it perhaps that XHTML specification mandates that the value of
an element attribute MUST be specified on a single line?  Or possibly
that XHTML imposes a character length limit on the value of an attribute? 
-- 

Henry Rzepa. +44 (0)20 7594 5774 (Office) +44 (0)20 7594 5804 (Fax)
Dept. Chemistry, Imperial College, London, SW7  2AY, UK. 
http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/

Received on Tuesday, 1 August 2000 08:37:07 UTC