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

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  • From: Christopher Allan Webber <cwebber AT dustycloud.org>
  • To: Richard Smith <richard AT ex-parrot.com>
  • Cc: cc-devel AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [cc-devel] Malformed HTML in CC licences
  • Date: Thu, 05 Jan 2012 11:11:53 -0600
Thanks for the heads up and for the useful analysis. I'll try to have
this fixed up by the end of the day.

Richard Smith <richard AT ex-parrot.com> writes:

> Nathan Yergler wrote:
>
>> Yikes. Regardless of whether they're well formed as XML, these do need
>> to be well formed HTML to fulfill the promise that they operate as
>> linked data documents.
>
> Thanks for your reply. I agree it needs to be well-formed
> HTML, but this needn't mean HTML 4. Everything I've read
> that purports to be a standard on linked data documents
> allows for XHTML dialects too. As the CC licences are
> generated with 'transitional' XHTML 1.0 <!DOCTYPE>
> declarations, presumably they are intended to be in that
> dialect. And if so, well-formed XHTML 1.0 simply means
> well-formed XML.
>
> We can probably never have totally valid XHTML (as opposed
> to well-formed XHTML) because the RDFa attributes such as
> 'about' and 'resource' are not valid XHTML. Nor are the
> extra namespace declarations needed on the <html> element.
> But parsers don't need to validate so that shouldn't be a
> problem.
>
>> In the case of the extraneous span close tag,
>> that looks like a bug in the template
>> (http://code.creativecommons.org/viewgit/cc.engine.git/tree/cc/engine/templates/licenses/standard_deed.html#n167)
>> that's going to be present in every core deed generated.
>
> I guessed there must have been a template somewhere, but
> hadn't managed to locate it.
>
> The </span> is the major problem here as it is the only one
> current parsers are not reliable at recovering from, and
> it's unambiguously an error: the line simply needs deleting.
> Is posting here sufficient to get that fixed? If not, what
> should I do?
>
> But if we marking the document as XHTML and therefore XML,
> we really should correct the other well-formedness issues.
> The three unescaped ampersands are generated on this line:
>
>
> http://code.creativecommons.org/viewgit/cc.engine.git/tree/cc/engine/templates/macros_templates/deed.html#n143
>
> Each instances of '&' simply need replacing with '&amp;'.
> This is a legitimate (but not usually necessary) thing to do
> in HTML 4, but is necessary with XHTML's stricter parsing
> rules. A discussion on this incompatibility can be found
> here:
>
> http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/#C_12
>
> but the summary is that it is always a good idea to escape
> the '&' in this manner.
>
> The two unescaped '<' signs are generated on this line:
>
>
> http://code.creativecommons.org/viewgit/cc.engine.git/tree/cc/engine/templates/macros_templates/deed.html#n163
>
> In this context, HTML 4 prohibits '<' being escaped as &lt;
> while XHTML mandates it. For maximum compatibility we
> probably want our document to work when parsed as HTML or as
> XHTML, and there are two types of trick that can be used to
> fix this. The most flexible is to use a <![CDATA]> section
> that will appear to be commented out to a HTML 4 parser.
> This is described here:
>
> http://javascript.about.com/library/blxhtml.htm
>
> We would simply change
>
> document.write( ... );
>
> to
>
> /* <![CDATA[ */
> document.write( ... );
> /* ]]> */
>
> These changes are all harmless to a HTML 4 parser, but make
> the difference between the document being well-formed XHTML
> or not.
>
> Richard
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