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Bug 10805 - treating single quotes as double quotes not needed for compatibility with existing content
Summary: treating single quotes as double quotes not needed for compatibility with exi...
Status: RESOLVED FIXED
Alias: None
Product: HTML WG
Classification: Unclassified
Component: pre-LC1 HTML5 spec (editor: Ian Hickson) (show other bugs)
Version: unspecified
Hardware: PC Windows NT
: P2 normal
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Ian 'Hixie' Hickson
QA Contact: HTML WG Bugzilla archive list
URL: http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview...
Whiteboard:
Keywords: NE, WGDecision
Depends on:
Blocks: 10804
  Show dependency treegraph
 
Reported: 2010-09-29 11:36 UTC by Julian Reschke
Modified: 2011-04-08 22:12 UTC (History)
5 users (show)

See Also:


Attachments
test case for charset in single quotes (2.41 KB, text/html)
2010-09-29 11:36 UTC, Julian Reschke
Details

Description Julian Reschke 2010-09-29 11:36:18 UTC
Created attachment 916 [details]
test case for charset in single quotes

<http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html#content-type-sniffing>:

"Process the next character as follows:

If it is a U+0022 QUOTATION MARK ('"') and there is a later U+0022 QUOTATION MARK ('"') in s
If it is a U+0027 APOSTROPHE ("'") and there is a later U+0027 APOSTROPHE ("'") in s
    Return the encoding corresponding to the string between this character and the next earliest occurrence of this character."

This is indeed a violation of the Content-Type syntax defined in RFC 2616, in treating single quotes as allowed quoting characters.

The spec claims that this is required for "backwards compatibility with legacy content".

I'm attaching a test case that shows that the following browsers do *not* treat single quotes as defined by the spec:

IE6, IE8, IE9beta, Konqueror 4.4

Please remove the requirement.
Comment 1 Julian Reschke 2010-09-29 12:10:37 UTC
(In reply to comment #0)
> I'm attaching a test case that shows that the following browsers do *not* treat
> single quotes as defined by the spec:
> 
> IE6, IE8, IE9beta, Konqueror 4.4

(IE7 not tested)
Comment 2 Ian 'Hixie' Hickson 2010-09-30 03:01:32 UTC
EDITOR'S RESPONSE: This is an Editor's Response to your comment. If you are satisfied with this response, please change the state of this bug to CLOSED. If you have additional information and would like the editor to reconsider, please reopen this bug. If you would like to escalate the issue to the full HTML Working Group, please add the TrackerRequest keyword to this bug, and suggest title and text for the tracker issue; or you may create a tracker issue yourself, if you are able to do so. For more details, see this document:
   http://dev.w3.org/html5/decision-policy/decision-policy.html

Status: Rejected
Change Description: no spec change
Rationale: Gecko, Opera, and WebKit all do this. If you want the spec to say something else, get them to change their browsers first.

http://www.hixie.ch/tests/adhoc/html/parsing/encoding/075.html
Comment 3 Julian Reschke 2010-09-30 07:36:18 UTC
(In reply to comment #2)
> EDITOR'S RESPONSE: This is an Editor's Response to your comment. If you are
> satisfied with this response, please change the state of this bug to CLOSED. If
> you have additional information and would like the editor to reconsider, please
> reopen this bug. If you would like to escalate the issue to the full HTML
> Working Group, please add the TrackerRequest keyword to this bug, and suggest
> title and text for the tracker issue; or you may create a tracker issue
> yourself, if you are able to do so. For more details, see this document:
>    http://dev.w3.org/html5/decision-policy/decision-policy.html
> 
> Status: Rejected
> Change Description: no spec change
> Rationale: Gecko, Opera, and WebKit all do this. If you want the spec to say
> something else, get them to change their browsers first.
> 
> http://www.hixie.ch/tests/adhoc/html/parsing/encoding/075.html

Microsoft and KDE do it right. If you think the spec needs to overrule the base spec, please convince KDE and Microsoft to change their implementations.

Will raise as tracker issue.
Comment 4 Julian Reschke 2010-09-30 11:35:29 UTC
Now raised as

  http://www.w3.org/html/wg/tracker/issues/125
Comment 5 Sam Ruby 2011-03-15 15:35:40 UTC
Working Group Decision: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2011Mar/0304.html
Comment 6 Julian Reschke 2011-03-16 12:56:35 UTC
Please consider moving the text in question into a separate subsection; see proposal in <http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2011Mar/0327.html>.
Comment 7 Ian 'Hixie' Hickson 2011-04-08 22:12:18 UTC
I assume comment 5 is asking for this change: "Instead of saying this is a willful violation of HTTP say this is a distinct algorithm from HTTP Content-Type processing for usage outside of HTTP."

I applied comment 5 and comment 6.
Comment 8 contributor 2011-04-08 22:12:33 UTC
Checked in as WHATWG revision r5979.
Check-in comment: apply wg decision
http://html5.org/tools/web-apps-tracker?from=5978&to=5979