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

On Sat, 02 Feb 2008 01:38:11 +0100, Anne van Kesteren <annevk@opera.com>  
wrote:

>>> 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.

But the MathML entities would have a required semicolon, and you don't  
really have semicolons in URLs that would make part of it match an  
entity... though, I haven't really made up my mind about this yet.


> Also, it doesn't address Henri's second point about catching input  
> errors.

"&copy" would still be an error AFAICT.

-- 
Simon Pieters
Opera Software

Received on Saturday, 2 February 2008 01:17:30 UTC