[whatwg] Make quoted attributes a conformance criteria

Bil Corry bil at corry.biz
Fri Jul 24 15:26:23 PDT 2009


Keryx Web wrote on 7/24/2009 2:52 PM: 
> In that post I talked about a common scenario. One developer works on
> the business logic. It puts out attribute values. Another developer
> works on the presentation logic. He makes templates. Dev 2 omits the
> quotes and for a long time it might work, since the business logic in
> question only produces single word values. Then there might come a
> change, because dev 1 - or the users of the CMS - suddenly starts to
> produce longer values. Suddenly things break, and since nobody touched
> the presentation logic code, it might not be the first place where the
> developers look for an error.

That's a classic XSS vulnerability.  The backend developer must know if there are quotes or not in the template, then encode/sanitize the value accordingly.


- Bil






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