Re: [wsrp-wsia] [change request #143] Properly encode '&' in examplesand BNF

[Alejandro Abdelnur <alejandro.abdelnur@sun.com>]

Wouldn't this be taken care by the XML encoding that happens when you 
put the content into the SOAP response? Same as the < and > ? What am I 
missing?

Rich Thompson wrote:

>Document: Spec
>Section:  10.2.1 and 10.2.2
>Page/Line: 58/15 and 61/24
>Requested by: Mike Freedman
>Old text: 
>wsrp-rewrite?wsrp-urlType=value&name1=value1&name2=value2.../wsrp-rewrite
>
>New text: wsrp-rewrite?wsrp-urlType&amp;name1=value1&amp;name2=value2
>.../wsrp-rewrite
>
>Reasoning: If the content containing the wsrp-rewrite is XML them the use 
>of & makes its on invalid document.  Rather the & must be expressed as 
>&amp;  We should just make this form the standard use rather then 
>supporting both flavors as supporting both has a negative impact on the 
>implementation/performance of the consumer rewrite code -- something that 
>needs to stay as efficient as possible.  Note: we should also change the 
>producer template URL to use &amp; as we don't know the content the 
>producer will produce.  Finally, we should chaneg the BNF. FYI ... what 
>follows is a brief paragraph from the XHTML spec explaining the above 
>problem:
>
>C.12. Using Ampersands in Attribute Values (and Elsewhere)
>In both SGML and XML, the ampersand character ("&") declares the beginning 
>of an entity reference (e.g., &reg; for the registered trademark symbol 
>"®"). Unfortunately, many HTML user agents have silently ignored incorrect 
>usage of the ampersand character in HTML documents - treating ampersands 
>that do not look like entity references as literal ampersands. XML-based 
>user agents will not tolerate this incorrect usage, and any document that 
>uses an ampersand incorrectly will not be "valid", and consequently will 
>not conform to this specification. In order to ensure that documents are 
>compatible with historical HTML user agents and XML-based user agents, 
>ampersands used in a document that are to be treated as literal characters 
>must be expressed themselves as an entity reference (e.g. "&amp;"). For 
>example, when the href attribute of the a element refers to a CGI script 
>that takes parameters, it must be expressed as 
>http://my.site.dom/cgi-bin/myscript.pl?class=guest&amp;name=user rather 
>than as http://my.site.dom/cgi-bin/myscript.pl?class=guest&name=user.
>
>
>
>
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