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Based on data from Google, requiring &s to be escaped in URL-heavy pages (like most major sites) causes something like a 6% increase in file size. This error seems more common than the error it is trying to catch (accidentally forgetting the semicolon in an entity), but it would leave sites exposed to accidental entities, e.g. in the case of: http://example.com?cut©paste;color&style&bold
maybe only if followed by alphanumeric ASCII and an equals sign?
It is useful to know if a semi-colon has accidentally been omitted from an entity reference, or if you've unintentionally used a sequence that looks like an entity reference. This could be defined so that it is valid when: 1. The value is alphanumeric ASCII followed an equals sign 2. The value does not match one of the defined entity references. So the most common cases of "?x&foo=1" would be valid. But "?x©=1" would be invalid because © is an entity and, in this case, would be resolved to "?x©=1", which is not likely what the author wants.
"?x©=1" in an attribute would not be treated as an entity, though, so the author still wouldn't be affected... Are you sure we need to check for matches even though they won't be handled as such? Maybe I don't really understand what you are proposing.
I've tried to do this. The spec text for this is highly unintuitive, but I hope it matches practical intuition more than the previous text. I'm not compeltely convinced that this is a good idea, so let me know if you think this should be changed back.
(In reply to comment #3) > "?x©=1" in an attribute would not be treated as an entity Yes it would because "©" is one of the entity references that needs to be supported without the use of the semi-colon on the end. Try it. http://software.hixie.ch/utilities/js/live-dom-viewer/?%3C!DOCTYPE%20html%3E%0A%3Ca%20href%3D%22%3Fx%26copy%3D1%22%3Etest%3C%2Fa%3E
Reverted.
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Apparently, this change *was* applied later on. Is there another bug related to this?