[whatwg] Comments on Web Forms 2.0

[Henri Sivonen]

On Dec 28, 2004, at 18:53, fantasai wrote:

> 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.

Expecting NCRs to allow characters to be smuggled is unsafe, because 
clueful processing converts NCRs to straight characters.

>>> 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.

Indeed.

Possible other magic marker characters:

ASCII visible, easy to use with the US keyboard and reasonable with 
European keyboards
U+007C VERTICAL LINE
U+007E TILDE
U+005E CIRCUMFLEX ACCENT

Non-ASCII visible, available in legacy fonts, can be typed using Mac kb 
layouts:
U+2022 BULLET

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen at iki.fi
http://iki.fi/hsivonen/