Re: &foo= in attribute values (and why defining conformance matters)

On Sat, 11 Jul 2009 03:02:31 +0200, Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> wrote:

>> Data:
>> http://philip.html5.org/data/entities-without-semicolon-followed-by-equals.txt
>>
>> The ones below are those that would be affected by this change. This is
>> 50 occurrences out of 425K pages.
>>
>> As far as I can tell, all of these seem to expect the literal text
>> treatment rather than the entity treatment.
>
> I only looked at a few, but of those some where text/plain documents (and
> so irrelevant),

I excluded those manually.

> some were script blocks (and so unaffected),

I excluded those too.

> some were
> cases of &amp= where it was clear that &amp; was intended (with no = at
> all)

Not sure I understand. Can you cite one? If there was no = then it  
wouldn't be affected by the change?

I explicitly listed those that would be affected by the change...


> and where the result wouldn't be technically correct either way, but
> where things seemed to work in practice the way they are now, and some
> were cases where it was clear that what was written wouldn't work as
> intended (eg. &GT=) but where in practice the results wouldn't differ
> visibly if we changed it (i.e. it's unclear if the server-side is working
> around the error in some way we don't know about).
>
> I'm very reluctant to change this. This is exactly the kind of thing  
> where
> we could cause subtle compatibility errors, and where a change would mean
> a gratuitous change relative to deployed browsers.

I see it as a minor change that aligns behavior with authors' expectations  
and doesn't seem to break any pages.

-- 
Simon Pieters
Opera Software

Received on Monday, 13 July 2009 09:28:07 UTC