Re: character references, trailing ';', urls

Jorge wrote:
> On Sun, May 04, 2014 at 12:34:24AM +0000, eocene wrote:
> > 
> > I was looking at how badly dillo handles something like:
> > 
> > <a href="http://www.dillo.org?asdf&copy=3&micro=zxcv">link</a>
> > 
> > It becomes a much more common problem with html5, which has a
> > _lot_ more character references.
> > 
> > 
> > I could perhaps stick an argument on the Html_parse_entity() in
> > Html_get_attr2(), telling it to insist upon finding a ';'.
> > 
> > If we still had cvs.auriga, I could dig through prehistory and
> > try to see whether not demanding ';' termination was initially
> > done with the strong belief that it was for the best overall
> > (or maybe it was even inherited from gzilla), but we don't have
> > cvs.auriga, and we don't have mailing list search working (not
> > that that's generally very fun to dig through in any case).
> > After all, maybe we should always insist upon proper termination.
> 
>   This heuristics are not simple.
> 
>   AFAIR the original routine was written to require the trailing ';'
> and it worked well for some time. Then more pages started to show
> unterminated entities inside, and it got so annoying we decided to
> make it more flexible and not to require the ';' when the entity
> name was found (IIRC).

Yeah, this is why I was considering just changing the get_attr case,
but of course I don't want to make the code messy and complicated
unless I need to.
 
>   It'd be good to find the reason for the change before reverting it.
> I don't remember it now, but I do remember it was because the other way
> started to be perceived as worst in some sense.
> 
>   Maybe GMANE has the mailing list archives...

I guess I'll put some time into digging around.

Maybe it happens out there and I just don't hear about it, but I
wonder why projects don't tend to keep track -- in some organized
fashion by topic, like in a wiki or group of static web pages or
something -- all of the decisions made on various issues and the
reasoning surrounding them, since it's hard to remember details
for years, people come and go, etc.