[whatwg] Attribute for holding private data for scripting

[Anne van Kesteren]

On Wed, 11 Apr 2007 13:53:21 +0200, Sam Ruby <rubys at intertwingly.net>  
wrote:

> Anne van Kesteren wrote:
>> On Wed, 11 Apr 2007 13:40:39 +0200, Sam Ruby <rubys at intertwingly.net>  
>> wrote:
>>> Per HTML5 section 8.1.2.3, however, such an attribute name would not  
>>> be considered conformant.
>>  Yes, only attributes defined in the specification are conformant.
>
> I was specifically referring to section 8.1.2.3.  Let me call your  
> attention to the following text:
>
>      Attribute names use characters in the range U+0061 LATIN SMALL
>      LETTER A .. U+007A LATIN SMALL LETTER Z, or, in uppercase, U+0041
>      LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A .. U+005A LATIN CAPITAL LETTER Z, and U+002D
>      HYPHEN-MINUS (-).

I think you should read the whole section. Allowing colons there wouldn't  
make a difference.


>>> Despite this, later in document, in the description of "Attribute name  
>>> state", no parse error is produced for this condition.  Nor does the  
>>> current html5lib parser produce a parse error with this data.
>>
>> Correct. We're not doing validation. Just tokenizing and building a  
>> tree.
>
> In the process, parse errors are generally emitted in cases where  
> individual characters are encountered which do not match the lexical  
> grammar rules.  Just not in this case.

The above are not the grammar rules. They are (normative) guidelines for  
people writing or generating HTML. As far as I can tell there's no  
normative grammar. Just a way to construct a conforming string and a way  
to interpret a random string.


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