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Re: element markup in attributes

• From: Philippe Poulard <philippe.poulard@sophia.inria.fr>
• To: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@simonstl.com>
• Date: Thu, 18 Feb 2010 10:27:46 +0100

Simon St.Laurent wrote:
> Michael Kay wrote:
>>> What do folks think?  Is this reasonable, given the use case, or is 
>>> this pushing too hard on attributes and escaping?
>>
>> A number of people have commented on the aesthetics, and I agree with 
>> them
>> entirely.
>>
>> However, there is also a technical argument: XSLT, XQuery, and any other
>> processing engine that takes an XML-centric view of the world, will be 
>> quite
>> incapable of generating this stuff.
> 
> I'm afraid XML-centric views of the world have little traction with the 
> creators of HTML5.  Remember, HTML5 preferred to define its own syntax:
> 
> http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/syntax.html#parsing
> 
> "While the HTML syntax described in this specification bears a close 
> resemblance to SGML and XML, it is a separate language with its own 
> parsing rules."
> 
> It does support an XHTML syntax:
> 
> http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/the-xhtml-syntax.html#the-xhtml-syntax
> 
> HTML5 is still, of course, markup, which is why I asked about this 
> particular construct here.
> 

Hi,

We already have a data URI scheme for images:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_URI_scheme

<img src="data:image/png;base64,
iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAoAAAAKCAYAAACNMs+9AAAABGdBTUEAALGP
C/xhBQAAAAlwSFlzAAALEwAACxMBAJqcGAAAAAd0SU1FB9YGARc5KB0XV+IA
AAAddEVYdENvbW1lbnQAQ3JlYXRlZCB3aXRoIFRoZSBHSU1Q72QlbgAAAF1J
REFUGNO9zL0NglAAxPEfdLTs4BZM4DIO4C7OwQg2JoQ9LE1exdlYvBBeZ7jq
ch9//q1uH4TLzw4d6+ErXMMcXuHWxId3KOETnnXXV6MJpcq2MLaI97CER3N0
vr4MkhoXe0rZigAAAABJRU5ErkJggg==" alt="Red dot" />

I hope this will be adopted in HTML5

And I wonder why we need another system for iframes, since the idea is 
to embed related resources in a single standalone document:

<iframe src="data:text/html;base64,
iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAoAAAAKCAYAAACNMs+9AAAABGdBTUEAALGP etc"/>

and please don't argue that massive escapes within attributes are 
readable, they aren't, and are error prone (this last point is also to 
consider, I have recently to deal with some HTML content that was built 
from a template, but the underlying engine didn't perform escapes 
correctly, and I found in attributes some unexpected quote that breaks 
the code; with an opaque encoding such as base64, we prevent such errors)

-- 
Cordialement,

               ///
              (. .)
  --------ooO--(_)--Ooo--------
|      Philippe Poulard       |
  -----------------------------
  http://reflex.gforge.inria.fr/
        Have the RefleX !

• References:
  • element markup in attributes
    • From: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@simonstl.com>
  • RE: element markup in attributes
    • From: "Michael Kay" <mike@saxonica.com>
  • Re: element markup in attributes
    • From: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@simonstl.com>