[whatwg] Allowing ">" in attribute values

[Tab Atkins Jr.]

On Thu, Jun 24, 2010 at 8:20 AM, Benjamin M. Schwartz
<bmschwar at fas.harvard.edu> wrote:
> On 06/24/2010 11:04 AM, Kornel Lesinski wrote:
>> If you mean "parsing" with regular expressions, then I think that's a bad practice and shouldn't be encouraged.
>
> Worldwide, regarding HTML, I'm sure there is 100 times more regular
> expression processing code than full-on lexing code.  Most code that
> processes HTML is embedded in scripts, doing some small special-purpose
> operation.  Those regular expressions aren't going away.  Helping them
> break less is a noble cause.

Actually, if we could make regex-based "parsing" break more, it would
probably be a net positive for the world.  Regexes are the source of
so many holes in "validation"-type scripts.

In any case, XML doesn't require > to be escaped in attribute values,
and HTML doesn't appear to either.  In practice, > is used in
attribute values, so declaring it verboten wouldn't be helpful.

~TJ