Re: Resources for AtomPub parser validation

["Thomas Broyer" <t.broyer@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Jul 3, 2008 at 5:38 PM, Aristotle Pagaltzis wrote:
>
> * James Holderness <j4_james@xxxxxxxxxxx> [2008-07-01 00:35]:
>> Tim Bray wrote:
>>> In a traditional bad-HTML-on-the-web doc, of which there are
>>> billions, you'd quite likely just write it as
>>>
>>> <img src="foo?bar=1&baz=2">
>>>
>>> and the browser would be forgiving and figure out what you
>>> meant.
>>
>> Unless the url was something like: compare?original=1&copy=2
>
> Which is of course why the W3C established a semicolon as the
> recommended query string pair separator a decade ago, so that
> you could write
>
>    compare?original=1;copy=2
>
> which requires no monkeying with any XML/SGML/HTML escape
> mechanism at all.

...except if you use an ampersand in a value...

    foo?bar=baz&copy;baz=quux

> Pity that most web app libraries/frameworks don't even support
> this form as input, far fewer still generate links in this form
> by default, and not a single browser encodes GET form parameters
> like this, not even optionally.

Blame the W3C, they didn't ever bother to add such a semi-colon
separated form parameters format to HTML (they fixed it in XForms
though: http://www.w3.org/TR/xforms/#serialize-urlencode )


-- 
Thomas Broyer