[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Entities in Attribute Values
On Thu, 12 Jun 1997, David Schach wrote: > Because entity references are allowed inside ot attribute values, it is > not possible to store an unmodified URL with data in an attribute. For > example, the following XML is not valid because the '&''s are not > escaped inside of SELF's HREF value. This is a problem only if '&' *must* be the field separator. Why not something else,, like ';' ? > <SELF > HREF="http://someserver/scripts/oleisapi2.dll/comics.custom.cdf?comics=o > n&dilbert=on&calvin=on&peanuts=on" /> > > This makes it inconvenient to store URL's in XML files. Would it anyone > be interested in changing entity processing to fix this? IMHO, there's no need for that. Or, at any rate, there shouldn't be. Using '&' as a field separator in "query URLs" is a historical artefact of lack of RTFM. The problem was recognized reasonably early too, and a fix was proposed, but no HTML browser implementor of, ah, consequence ever got a Round Tuit. >From RFC 1866, Section 8.2.1 "The form-urlencoded Media Type": NOTE - The URI from a query form submission can be used in a normal anchor style hyperlink. Unfortunately, the use of the `&' character to separate form fields interacts with its use in SGML attribute values as an entity reference delimiter. For example, the URI `http://host/?x=1&y=2' must be written `<a href="http://host/?x=1&y=2"' or `<a href="http://host/?x=1&y=2">'. HTTP server implementors, and in particular, CGI implementors are encouraged to support the use of `;' in place of `&' to save users the trouble of escaping `&' characters this way. We're not committed to perpetauting mistakes, are we? Arjun xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ To unsubscribe, send to majordomo@i... the following message; unsubscribe xml-dev List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (rzepa@i...)
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