[whatwg] [wf2] Note about XML attribute value handling

[Anne van Kesteren]

Mikko Rantalainen wrote:
>> Could we perhaps make a note about this in the WF2 specification:
>>   <http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/#AVNormalize>
>>
>> Preferably somewhere close to <input type=hidden>. My weblog used to 
>> run on XHTML and previewed weblog comments where stored inside the 
>> VALUE attribute of a hiddenINPUT element (actually, that is still the 
>> case). As XHTML means the above mentioned XML rule applies all 
>> formatting got lost. That was a major problem for white-space 
>> significant replies. (Replies using the PRE element.)
>
> <input type="hidden"> works just fine with existing UAs even when one 
> uses application/xhtml+xml provided that all meaningful whitespace has 
> been converted to entities. 
 for LF, 
 for CR and so on. PHP, 
> for example, provides function htmlentities() exactly for this purpose.

Really? Why would 'htmlentities' be useful in an XML environment? Also, 
getting HTML *entities* in your XML document doesn't seem like a good thing.

(I'm aware of possible solutions. It's just that you don't normally 
think of this. Even Tim Bray - editor of the XML specification - called 
it "broken as designed".)


-- 
  Anne van Kesteren
  <http://annevankesteren.nl/>