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Re: [xsl] special character


Subject: Re: [xsl] special character
From: Mike Brown <mike@xxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 3 Dec 2002 12:44:08 -0700 (MST)

David Carlisle wrote:
> The exception is if you are doing the html output method, and writing an
> html attribute that is a URI (a href= or <img src= then that attribute
> is URL encoded (using %ab hex quotes)

Specifically, the XSLT spec suggests that when using the HTML output method,
that the XSLT processor do some escaping of *non-ASCII* characters in the
href, src, codebase, or other URI-type attribute value. The XSLT processor is
not required to do so -- in my opinion, it shouldn't bother, because it is the
author's responsibility to ensure that the value is a URI reference, not an
IRI.

Non-ASCII characters are not the only characters that need to be escaped in a
URI, but they comprise a set that can never appear unescaped, so the
suggestion to escape them is not harmful. The escape mechanism recommended is
UTF-8 based, so for a character such as Å (Latin capital letter A with carat)
it would be %C3%85.

I think this is not the first time I've seen a report of an XSLT processor
applying a bit more escaping than is called for, or doing non-UTF-8 based 
escaping, but it is the first time I've heard of it happening in a non-URI 
attribute value.

Mike

-- 
  Mike J. Brown   |  http://skew.org/~mike/resume/
  Denver, CO, USA |  http://skew.org/xml/

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