Ampersands in attribute values (was: Re: Validation error frequencies)

On Fri, 01 Feb 2008 01:33:38 +0100, Simon Pieters <simonp@opera.com> wrote:
> On Thu, 31 Jan 2008 22:50:52 +0100, Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi>  
> wrote:
>>> 0094 / 400 Text after “&” did not match an entity name.
>>
>> Using a markup-significant character in URLs was a bad design choice,  
>> but it is too late to change it. It would be great if the harmless  
>> cases could be made non-errors without making stuff like &copy turning  
>> into the copyright sign pass silently.
>>
>> I don't have a concrete suggestion at this time, though.
>
>     If no match can be made, then this is a parse error. No characters  
> are
>     consumed, and nothing is returned.
>
> s/this is a parse error. N/n/

I think this is harmful as it encourages authors to rely on things we  
might want to change. For instance, introducing the entities from MathML  
at some point. Also, it doesn't address Henri's second point about  
catching input errors.


-- 
Anne van Kesteren
<http://annevankesteren.nl/>
<http://www.opera.com/>

Received on Saturday, 2 February 2008 00:34:53 UTC