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The text <link href> says it "must contain a valid non-empty URL potentially surrounded by spaces." Further down in the section on how to "obtain the resource" the first item in the list says "1. If the href attribute's value is the empty string, then abort these steps." http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#attr-link-href It's not clear when/if the space should be removed from the @href value. Perhaps you can make the space removal explicit, for example by adding a new first step in the process to "obtain the resource", like so: 1. Remove leading and trailing space from the href attribute's value 2. If the href attribute's value is the empty string, then abort these steps. 3. ... (Mozilla bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=649134)
Additional note: HTTP/1.1 doesn't include \f in space, unlike HTML5, so it's unclear how Link: <\014>; rel="stylesheet" should be processed for HTML documents. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=649134#c11
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: "must contain a valid non-empty URL potentially surrounded by spaces" is an authoring requirement, not an implementation requirement. It only affects whether the page is valid, and has no bearing on how browsers should process the page: """ Note: There is no implied relationship between document conformance requirements and implementation conformance requirements. User agents are not free to handle non-conformant documents as they please; the processing model described in this specification applies to implementations regardless of the conformity of the input documents. """ http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/infrastructure.html#conformance-classes If you follow the "obtain the resource" algorithm exactly as specified, without making any assumptions based on authoring conformance criteria or other considerations, it's clear that you should only abort if the href is an empty string. Nothing says you should abort if the href consists of one or more space characters. Please reopen if you either think the spec should change to also include whitespace-only href's, or if you think it should be further clarified somehow to say that it really only means the empty string. In general, it's hard to clarify this sort of thing, where someone is reading between the lines of algorithms instead of taking them completely literally.
mass-moved component to LC1