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public-html-comments posting from: Bert Bos <bert@w3.org> http://www.w3.org/mid/201108082059.25340.bert@w3.org
[[ A personal comment on http://www.w3.org/TR/2011/WD- html5-20110525/elements.html#the-title-attribute (That section is actually only an example, but I didn't immediately see where the parsing of attributes is formally defined. Sorry.) The way string-valued attributes are processed in HTML5 is not backwards compatible with the way in HTML4. In HTML4, newlines in the source become spaces in the attribute value, but in HTML5 they become line feeds and/or carriage returns. Section 3.2.3.2 shows an example: although the mark-up contains no " " entity, the attribute value still contains a line feed. The handling of line ends isn't specific to HTML4, but is a property of SGML (and thus also XML) and thus it risks being difficult to change in existing software. In my own software, e.g., it is handled at a very low level in the tokenizer. The proposed new way is also inconvenient: In HTML4, you can format the source code to avoid long lines: ... <span title="Some long title here">...</span> <span title="Some long title here">...</span>... and the two attributes will be equal to one another, but not so in HTML5. ]]
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: This is another case where HTML4 was not aligned with popular implementations. E.g. not preserving whitespace for <input type=hidden> would break sites. And browsers actually got a lot of requests to preserver whitespace for the title attribute as well (in the UI, they already did at tree-level).