[whatwg] Comments on Web Forms 2.0

[fantasai]

Ian Hickson wrote:
> On Tue, 28 Dec 2004, Henri Sivonen wrote:
> 
>>According to http://www.unicode.org/faq/utf_bom.html#38 a data format or 
>>protocol may choose to ignore the BOM in the middle of a string.
> 
> HTML doesn't choose that, though, so that isn't relevant to us.

It would be if the HTML document in question passes through a processor
that takes advantage of this allowance. You could of course encode it
as a numerical entity.

>>Anyway, I'm still uncomfortable with using a deprecated character that 
>>has a very special other meaning as a magic marker in WF 2.0.
> 
> I'm not overjoyed with it myself, but I haven't got any better ideas. The 
> current system works quite well, and certainly works better than the "[]" 
> prefix that I first suggested.

That's questionable. At least the [] was visible so you could tell it was there.
I have a strong suspicion that editing invisible characters is more error-prone
than editing visible ones. And the idea of a disappearing invisible character
seems like it would be a bit bizarre to explain to the average person.

~fantasai