Posted by John Dunlop on 10/12/06 19:59

Nikita the Spider:

> Myself, I'm pretty impressed by the fact that the entity-encoded address
> received only two spams while its unprotected counterpart has received
> over 700. If this method is inferior, I'd like to know to what!

mentioned now more than once in this thread: normal counter-spam
measures. That means junk mail filters both at the server and at the
MUA.

[re e-mail address obfuscation running contrary to the spirit of
Internet specs]

> I see your point, but the spec isn't strongly worded.

Well, every clause in the spec is vague enough to be open to, however
absurd, interpretation.

I specifically talked not about the spec's wording but about its
spirit. To learn about the spirit of HTML you have to trace its
history: follow the past discussions, study the earlier drafts and
specifications, find out why the constructs were introduced in the
first place.

> As you pointed out, the relevant section is here:
>
> http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/charset.html#h-5.3

I quoted from there but did not mean that as the 'relevant section' to
learn why character references came about. You will find that not in
the HTML4.0 spec but in ISO8879 (my copy's at work and I haven't yet
memorised it all, so much to my consternation I can't give you chapter
and verse.)

> But it also says this:
> "Character references are a character encoding-independent mechanism for
> entering any character from the document character set."
>
> Using entities to encode email addresses fits perfectly well within this
> provision, IMO.

That's not even half the story.

--
Jock

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