- From: Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>
- Date: Sun, 6 Jun 2010 01:12:49 +0000 (UTC)
- To: public-html@w3.org
ISSUE-103 ========= SUMMARY Defer to the XML specification. RATIONALE HTML and XML differ in the requirements for escaping the value of "srcdoc". While the HTML specification defines the HTML syntax, it doesn't define the XML syntax and therefore should not attempt to redundantly repeat the rules in the XML specification. This is especially important in this case because the rules are remarkably complicated, and it is highly likely that any description we include here will be incomplete or misleading in some way. The target audience for this section is people writing serialisers for HTML and XML documents. (The target audience isn't people who hand-author their documents, since srcdoc="" isn't especially useful for hand authoring -- the whole point is to provide defense in depth for documents that embed content automatically.) People writing HTML serialisers can legitimately be expected to be writing their software using string concatenation, despite this being a suboptimal design: this indeed is the common way for such software to be written. For these authors, therefore, it is helpful for the specification to describe the HTML escaping rules relevant here. People writing XHTML tools, though, are much more likely to be using tool chains that already have XML serialisers, and thus they are less likely to need guidance as to what to escape -- the authors of XML serialisers are more likely to use the XML specification than the HTML specification in writing their software. The paragraph should therefore have the following qualities: * It should say that the situation with XML is more complex, because the situation in XML is more complex. * It should not attempt to describe these rules, because the rules are long, and not useful to readers of this specification. * It should defer to and reference the XML specification, because that is the relevant specification for this issue. DETAILS Change the following paragraph: Due to restrictions of the XML syntax, in XML a number of other characters need to be escaped also to ensure correctness. ...to: In the XHTML syntax, a number of other characters also need to be escaped, as defined by the XML specification. [XML] IMPACT POSITIVE EFFECTS By explicitly stating that the XML spec's rules are relevant here, authors will not be misled into thinking that they can use the HTML rules for XML. NEGATIVE EFFECTS None. CONFORMANCE CLASS CHANGES None. RISKS There's always the risk that someone will write an XML serialiser without reading the XML specification, even if we reference it. -- Ian Hickson U+1047E )\._.,--....,'``. fL http://ln.hixie.ch/ U+263A /, _.. \ _\ ;`._ ,. Things that are impossible just take longer. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
Received on Sunday, 6 June 2010 01:13:46 UTC