[I18N Core Response][CSS21] out of range unicode escapes

Hi,

I'm writing on behalf of the Internationalization Core Working Group. In 
our most recent teleconference, we discussed this issue again. 
Basically, the options for handling out of range Unicode escapes were:

- do nothing/permit the invalid code point
- replace with U+FFFD
- generate a parse error

The first option is a security risk and shouldn't be seriously 
considered. Either of the other options could potentially be a valid choice.

We note that this issue has to do with an escape sequence representing a 
Unicode character. It shouldn't be associated with transcoding errors 
from legacy encodings, although it could result from a bug in an escape 
generator. That is, such malformed sequences are generated purposefully.

We feel that the best response to this issue is to generate a parse 
error. Use of the replacement character might mask errors in the style 
sheet (since there is no obvious failure or failure location), while it 
is unlikely that the resulting sequence would produce the desired 
stylistic behavior anyway. Therefore, we recommend that the CSS working 
group, for clarity, add this text to 4.1.3 in CSS 2.1 at about

   http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/syndata.html#q6

     If the number is outside the range allowed by Unicode (e.g.,
     "\110000" is above 0x10FFFF, the largest Unicode code point),
     then the parser should treat this as a parse error and a user agent
     must ignore any declaration containing this invalid property name
     or value.

Note that this text is slightly revised from a previous proposal.

We welcome any comments you might have on this issue.

Best Regards,

Addison

-- 
Addison Phillips
Globalization Architect -- Yahoo! Inc.
Chair -- W3C Internationalization Core WG

Internationalization is an architecture.
It is not a feature.

Received on Tuesday, 26 June 2007 20:50:40 UTC