Re: Cougar DTD: Do not use CDATA declared content for SCRIPT

James Aylett <sja20@hermes.cam.ac.uk> wrote:
>On Wed, 24 Jul 1996, Arnoud Galactus Engelfriet wrote:
>
>> Foteos Macrides <MACRIDES@SCI.WFBR.EDU> wrote:
>> > 
>> > 	<SCRIPT SRC="data:..."></SCRIPT>
>> 
>> Ah, nice trick. :-) But then we can declare SCRIPT as EMPTY, and get
>> rid of the now useless </SCRIPT> closing element.
>> 
>> I *do* wonder how many people will be able to figure out how to inline
>> scripts this way; escaping spaces and the likes is not going to be
>> fun. 
>
>Hardly a significant problem, really; it would be practically trivial to
>write a program to convert a script file into the correct form. Perhaps
>better would be a method in the httpd of doing a server-side
>parse-and-include, so you keep it in a clear-text format and edit it on
>your side, and the httpd converts it into the legal format when required.
>An intelligent httpd would cache conversions, thus causing no significant
>overhead providing the use of scripts were kept to a sensible minimum (and
>for big scripts, if cached in memory, the whole thing could work
>significantly faster).

	It can be either "URL hex escaped" (don't know the formal term
for that 8-) or BASE64 encoded (same as for Basic Authentication) so lots
of Web software already has the functions for doing it, and it's just a
matter of adding an explicit interface.  Plus any hacker could whip up
a script for that in a matter of minutes, and offer it to the Web.


	This is another reason why it's so sad that the HTML 3.0 SRC
attributes were allow to be trashed, e.g.,

	<HR SRC="data:image/gif;base64,[custom horizontal rule]">
	

	SRC also should be added to STYLE:
	
	<STYLE SRC="data:..."></STYLE>
	
so that too becomes "backward compatible" for all clients since the
birth of the Web (as a content-rich, platform-independent, INFORMATION
sharing system 8-).

				Fote

=========================================================================
 Foteos Macrides            Worcester Foundation for Biomedical Research
 MACRIDES@SCI.WFBR.EDU         222 Maple Avenue, Shrewsbury, MA 01545
=========================================================================

Received on Wednesday, 24 July 1996 16:08:43 UTC