[whatwg] Proposal for improved handling of '#' inside of data URIs

[Boris Zbarsky]

On 9/10/11 7:44 PM, Adam Barth wrote:
> It seems like a bad idea to require look-ahead to parse data URLs.  Is
> there some reason we can't just treat the whole payload as part of the
> document?

Yes.  It breaks the xlink:href='#greenRect' sort of thing in SVG, unless 
you do some sort of other bizarre special-casing that violates the URI RFCs.

Of course WebKit does in fact do that sort of thing in SVG; see 
https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=63283 for a more egregious 
example...  But if you fixed those bugs, then you'd break things that 
should actually work, unless you actually allow data: URIs with a 
fragment identifier (which once again is required by the RFCs).

As it is, last I checked WebKit's behavior here is inconsistent; for a 
data: URI containing a '#' it in many cases treats the part after the 
'#' as _both_ part of the content and a fragment identifier  Again, all 
sorts of broken.

-Boris