Re: 9. Are > characters allowed in attribute values?

On Tue, 2012-09-04 at 00:12 -0400, Liam R E Quin wrote:
> On Mon, 2012-09-03 at 21:33 -0400, John Cowan wrote:
> 
> > 9. Are > characters allowed in attribute values?  There has been no
> > discussion, but nobody has asked for them.
> 
> No.

Sorry for being terse here. My reasoning is simply to make documents
slightly easier to process, e.g. with regular expressions. Yes, I've
read that fabulous reply on stackoverflow :) but in the world of text
processing people _do_ use regular expressions all the time.

However, James notes that canonicalization will put them back, so maybe
it's worth allowing them so we can continue to build on that work.

Similarly:

> Are they allowed in comments, if comments are allowed? Yes.
> Is -- allowed in comments? This was why I proposed
> <!--* .... this is a comment... *--> for XML.
> 
> The general issue is about "things allowed inside things and how to
> escape them".

I always used to wish SGML had just allowed \ anywhere and been more
regular, but part of that was my Unix background. It should at least
have allowed character references in GIs for example. But we are where
we are. I'll post separately about -- in comments.

-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/
Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org freenode/#xml

Received on Tuesday, 4 September 2012 20:29:40 UTC