[whatwg] Attribute for holding private data for scripting

[Sam Ruby]

Anne van Kesteren wrote:
> 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.

The document is a draft.  The subject line of this thread suggests that 
the WG is entertaining the notion of allowing at least one attribute 
which is not currently defined in the specification.  This suggests that 
the draft may need to change.  Drafts are like that.

Like others, I'm not convinced that the way forward is to allow a new 
attribute which has a micro-grammar for parsing what would be 
represented in the DOM essentially as a character blob.

>>>> 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/>
>