Entities in Attribute Values

David Schach (davidsch@microsoft.com)
Thu, 12 Jun 1997 18:25:07 -0700

Because entity references are allowed inside ot attribute values, it is
not possible to store an unmodified URL with data in an attribute. For
example, the following XML is not valid because the '&''s are not
escaped inside of SELF's HREF value.

<CHANNEL HREF="http://someserver/comics/">
<TITLE>Daily Comics</TITLE>

<!-- HEF's value is invalid in SELF because the &'s aren't
escaped as &amp; -->

<SELF
HREF="http://someserver/scripts/oleisapi2.dll/comics.custom.cdf?comics=o
n&dilbert=on&calvin=on&peanuts=on" />

</CHANNEL>

This makes it inconvenient to store URL's in XML files. Would it anyone
be interested in changing entity processing to fix this?