Unresolved bug in PR2.

[Linus Upson]

gwh at spiders.com (Gene W Homicki) writes:
> *** Problem #1b
>
> If I have the following HTML:
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> <textarea name="text1" ROWS=10 COLS=60>
> <STRONG>THIS IS A TEST</STRONG>
> <UL>
>   <LI>List item 1
>   <LI>List Item 2
> </UL>
> </TEXTAREA>
> ------------------------------------------------------------

This is bad html.  You really want to do:

<TEXTAREA name="text1" ROWS=10 COLS=60>
&lt;STRONG&gt;THIS IS A TEST&lt;/STRONG&gt;
&lt;UL&gt;
  &lt;LI&gt;List item 1
  &lt;LI&gt;List Item 2
&lt;/UL&gt;
</TEXTAREA>

There are four special characters which need to be "escaped" in  
html because they are used for markup:

<  ...  &lt;    or  &#60;
>  ...  &gt;    or  &#62;
&  ...  &amp;   or  &#38;
"  ...  &quot;  or  &#34;

Check out the html 2.0 spec on http://www.w3.org/ (or should I  
write <URL:http://www.w3.org/> ?-)

On a related issue, a problem I've been having with every browser,  
not just OmniWeb, is that nobody is consistent when these markup  
characters need to be escaped!  In general nobody seems to agree  
when you can use character entities and numerical character  
references.  How do you put a double quote in a text field?

<input name="fieldName" type="text" value="A Double Quote &quot;">

This works in OmniWeb, but in some browsers it just can't be done.   
Another important example is how do you put an ampersand in an  
href?

<a href="someURI?key1=value1&amp;key2=value2">

This doesn't work in most browsers, including OmniWeb.  OmniWeb  
does work if you just drop in a naked &, but that doesn't work in  
other browsers.

Does anybody know what the true religion is on these issues?

Thanks,
Linus Upson