[whatwg] several messages about the HTML syntax

[Øistein E. Andersen]

On Sun, 2 Mar 2008 23:02:07 +0000 (UTC), Ian Hickson wrote:
>On Sat, 15 Sep 2007, Henri Sivonen wrote:
>> 
>> Currently, unquoted attributes may start with a = 
>> [as in <img alt=="Foobar" src='404'>]
>> 
>> This means that the notion of conformance fails to catch what is most 
>> likely an error: [...]
>> 
>> To make the notion of conformance more useful for authors (that is, to 
>> make conformance checking catch unintentional stuff), I suggest making 
>> starting an unquoted attribute value with a = a parse error.
>
> Done.
>
>
> On Mon, 17 Sep 2007, Øistein E. Andersen wrote:
>> 
>> An alternative solution would be to require that unquoted attribute 
>> values not contain (single or double ASCII) quotes.
>
>Done.

I really meant to say that disallowing quotation marks in unquoted
attribute values would make conformance checkers able to detect
the particular error pointed out by Mr Sivonen even without disallowing
equals signs.  (The editor may well have noticed this, but his answer
does not reflect this.)

Other potential authoring mistakes pointed out since support the case
for disallowing quotation marks.  I am still not convinced about
the usefulness of disallowing equals signs, but I have not considered
the issue of which characters should be allowed or not in any detail.

-- 
Øistein E. Andersen