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Re: Some comments on the 1.1 draft

• To: "Jonathan Borden" <jborden@m...>, <xml-dev@l...>
• Subject: Re: Some comments on the 1.1 draft
• From: Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@m...>
• Date: Wed, 19 Dec 2001 18:12:17 -0500
• In-reply-to: <021e01c188cf$f5ba2730$0a2e249b@n...>
• References: <5C39F806F9939046B4B1AFE652500A3A251950@R...> <3C20DF04.3050209@d...><021301c188cb$08070160$0a2e249b@n...> <3C20FA7D.10801@d...><021e01c188cf$f5ba2730$0a2e249b@n...>

At 3:57 PM -0500 12/19/01, Jonathan Borden wrote:

>Hmmph... well I don't profess to understand much of this character stuff,
>but it seemed to me logical that character refs would be a good way to
>escape characters not otherwise allowed in text ... I'm sure there is a good
>reason why this isn't allowed -- I mean it does let me stuff an < into an
>attribute, so what is the huge difference between that and � ? Oh well,
>I never should have piped in on this thread anyways...
>

The difference is that < is a legal character in C strings whereas 
NUL is not. Once the parser decodes that reference and tries to stick 
it in a string or stuff it in a database, all hell can break loose. 
Some languages are more  hell-resistant than others, but it's a big 
enough problem that it does need to be considered.
-- 

+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@m... | Writer/Programmer |
+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
|          The XML Bible, 2nd Edition (Hungry Minds, 2001)           |
|              http://www.ibiblio.org/xml/books/bible2/              |
|   http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0764547607/cafeaulaitA/   |
+----------------------------------+---------------------------------+
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|  Read Cafe con Leche for XML News: http://www.ibiblio.org/xml/     |
+----------------------------------+---------------------------------+

• Follow-Ups:
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    • From: Mike Brown <mike@s...>

• References:
  • RE: Some comments on the 1.1 draft
    • From: "Michael Rys" <mrys@m...>
  • Re: Some comments on the 1.1 draft
    • From: Eric van der Vlist <vdv@d...>
  • Re: Some comments on the 1.1 draft
    • From: "Jonathan Borden" <jborden@m...>
  • Re: Some comments on the 1.1 draft
    • From: Eric van der Vlist <vdv@d...>
  • Re: Some comments on the 1.1 draft
    • From: "Jonathan Borden" <jborden@m...>

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