RE: attribute value escaping (was Re: disable escaping in copy)

[Kay Michael <Michael dot Kay at icl dot com>]

> > I'm not convinced that Xalan is making a good
> > decision here, because section 2.4.2 says
> 
> We are trying to follow
> http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt#section-HTML-Output-Method where it 
> says "The
> html output method should escape non-ASCII characters in URI attribute
> values using the method recommended in Section B.2.1 of the HTML 4.0
> Recommendation."
> 
> But, this is very problematic.  We took it out for a while, 
> then put it back in because another user was having problems with it not
being in.
> Argh!!!  What's a poor XSLT processor coder to do?

I have to say I've found this area very problematic in Saxon too. That's why
I added disable-output-escaping in xsl:attribute, to give the user a chance
to switch the behaviour off if it isn't what they want. For example, one
user was having trouble because the URL was already escaped and I was
double-escaping it. In Saxon I tried to follow the rules in the XSLT spec,
and the rules in the HTML 4.0 spec which it references, but I didn't follow
back to the rules in rfc2396. The only characters I escape are non-ASCII
characters (specifically, characters not in the range 32 to 126) plus space
and "%".

>  I would love to find the right behavior for this.  I'm certainly not very
happy 
> with the current behavior in Xalan.

I'll echo that. It's a horribly messy area.

Mike Kay


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