[xslt] uri escaping in html output, redux

[Ivan Kurmanov <kurmanov openlib org>]

Hi Sirs,

Before I start, let me thank you all for a great software
you do and wish you all a good new year.


I found at least two discussions of this issue in the past:

Libxslt escaping urls when outputting HTML by Andy Hird
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/xslt/2002-September/msg00006.html

Output escaping (again!) by Bruce Miller
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/xslt/2003-March/msg00020.html

(These are the initial messages in respective threads.)


I'm writing this to confirm that:

  - developers understand that current libxslt behaviour in
    this regard violates RFC 2396 "Uniform Resource
    Identifiers (URI): Generic Syntax";

  - for compatibility, this is not going to be fixed.

Is this correct?



I think (just as Bruce Miller, see second of the mentioned
threads) that Libxslt violates section 2.4.2 of the RFC:

   2.4.2. When to Escape and Unescape

   A URI is always in an "escaped" form, since escaping or
   unescaping a completed URI might change its semantics.
   Normally, the only time escape encodings can safely be
   made is when the URI is being created from its component
   parts; each component may have its own set of characters
   that are reserved, so only the mechanism responsible for
   generating or interpreting that component can determine
   whether or not escaping a character will change its
   semantics. Likewise, a URI must be separated into its
   components before the escaped characters within those
   components can be safely decoded.

   ...

   http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2396.txt

Stylesheet author only knows when and what part of URI to
escape.


My particular problem is that I can't make libxslt generate
<a href=""> construct with "+" character in the href
attribute value.  I need it for the query part of the URI:
href="http://some.site/script?argument+another"; and I get
href="http://some.site/script?argument%2Banother"; instead,
which is a different URL.

If there is any kind of workaround to this problem, I'll be
happy to know about it.  Thank you.


Ivan Kurmanov
http://ahinea.com/en/

working on http://acis.openlib.org/ open-source project