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

On Sun, 14 Jun 2009, Simon Pieters wrote:
> On Sat, 13 Jun 2009 00:22:19 +0200, Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> wrote:
> > >
> > > Writing HTML documents seems to make this valid:
> > > 
> > >    <a href="&copy=">
> > > 
> > > and claims that the attribute value contains just text and no 
> > > character references (since character references end with ";").
> > > 
> > > Yet, Parsing HTML documents interprets the above the same as <a 
> > > href="©=">, as far as I can tell.
> > 
> > Oops, I forgot about that case. Ok, reverted the change.
> 
> It might still be reasonable to change the parsing rules to make the 
> above case less surprising:
> 
> > >   3. Tweak the parsing rules so that = is treated the same as 
> > > 0-9a-zA-Z.
> 
> It would be different form what IE does, but I would be surprised if Web 
> compat requires the IE behavior here.

I'd really like to not risk changes to the parsing rules in this area. It 
took a lot of careful study to get to where we are now, and without 
repeating that work, I'd be very reluctant to experiment.

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