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cc-devel - [cc-devel] Malformed HTML in CC licences

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  • From: Richard Smith <richard AT ex-parrot.com>
  • To: cc-devel AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [cc-devel] Malformed HTML in CC licences
  • Date: Thu, 5 Jan 2012 01:29:43 +0000 (GMT)


Some of the current generation of CC licences including

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/

are malformed, whether parsed as HTML or XML. These are not problems with the extra RDFa attributes that are to be anticipated (and only affect the validity but not the wellformedness of the document). An example is the </span> tag on line 280. Less serious problems exist with failure to escaping '&' in URL attributes three times on line 396 and '<' in scripts twice on line 690. Similar issues with exist in comparable places in the other CC licences that I have checked (admitedly not the whole suite).

Would it be possible to fix the licences so that they are all well-formed XML, please?

This is considerably more serious and therefore urgent than a run-of-the-mill malformed HTML problem because the licences are supposed to be machine readable to allow RDFa parsers to glean ccREL metadata from the licence. One of the more popular RDFa parsers (Redland's) is unable to cope at all, and even if the parser can recover, it could easily result in some of the metadata being silently dropped. If a program is deciding whether to make a public copy of a document based on the ccREL metadata (as my code is), this could have serious legal consequences.

Thanks

Richard Smith




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