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Bug 14537 - <track> The string "<." creates a start tag with no name and an empty string class. Is that really what we want?
Summary: <track> The string "<." creates a start tag with no name and an empty string ...
Status: RESOLVED FIXED
Alias: None
Product: WHATWG
Classification: Unclassified
Component: HTML (show other bugs)
Version: unspecified
Hardware: Other other
: P3 blocker
Target Milestone: Unsorted
Assignee: Ian 'Hixie' Hickson
QA Contact: contributor
URL: http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/...
Whiteboard:
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2011-10-22 02:55 UTC by contributor
Modified: 2012-07-18 18:42 UTC (History)
4 users (show)

See Also:

Attachments

Description contributor 2011-10-22 02:55:01 UTC 
Specification: http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/the-video-element.html
Multipage: http://www.whatwg.org/C#webvtt-start-tag-class-state
Complete: http://www.whatwg.org/c#webvtt-start-tag-class-state

Comment:
The string "<." creates a start tag with no name and an empty string class. Is
that really what we want?

Posted from: 114.48.111.229 by annevk@opera.com
User agent: Opera/9.80 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.7.1; U; en) Presto/2.9.168 Version/11.51
Comment 1 Ian 'Hixie' Hickson 2011-10-26 00:41:35 UTC 
What would we want instead?
Comment 2 Ian 'Hixie' Hickson 2011-10-28 23:03:05 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: Did Not Understand Request
Change Description: no spec change
Rationale: see comment 1
Comment 3 Anne 2011-10-29 07:55:10 UTC 
I think empty string classes or annotations should never be created.

I do not have a good alternative for empty start tag names. (Other than emitting "<", which I'm not terribly fond of.)
Comment 4 Ian 'Hixie' Hickson 2011-10-29 16:13:37 UTC 
Without a good alternative, I don't know what to do.
Comment 5 Anne 2011-10-29 16:17:55 UTC 
Before appending a class or annotation, do an empty string check (probably after whitespace normalization/trimming).
Comment 6 Ian 'Hixie' Hickson 2011-10-30 17:49:08 UTC 
So leave the empty tag name, but drop the empty class name?
Comment 7 Anne 2011-10-31 14:14:55 UTC 
Empty tags are dropped on the floor later on, but empty classes end up being stored. That will lead to questions about whether or not they can be matched against, etc.
Comment 8 Ian 'Hixie' Hickson 2011-11-01 03:42:17 UTC 
So your problem isn't really with <. per so, but with <anything. >? Ok. Fixed.
Comment 9 contributor 2011-11-01 05:37:33 UTC 
Checked in as WHATWG revision r6795.
Check-in comment: Drop WebVTT class names that are the empty string.
http://html5.org/tools/web-apps-tracker?from=6794&to=6795