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

On Mon, 13 Jul 2009, Simon Pieters wrote:
> 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.

I meant from the original list.


> > 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 meant a case like:

   href="katalog.php?idkat=1&amp=idpkat=*&academia=f6c02c138da65199fb99c8dcc7e64326"


> > 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.

I don't think there's such a thing as a "minor" change in the parser at 
this point. This is an extremely brittle part of the platform.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Monday, 13 July 2009 09:56:48 UTC