microformats2-parsing-issues

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This page is for documenting issues with the microformats2-parsing specification.

issues

Proposal: addition of a new e-* parsing rule for iframe elements with srcdoc attributes. E.G.

<div class="h-entry">
 <iframe class="e-content" srcdoc="<p>A paragraph of HTML with &quot;quoted quotes&quot; &amp;amp; doubly quoted ampersands</p>" />
</div>

{
 "items": [{
  "type": ["h-entry"],
  "properties": {
   "content": ["<p>A paragraph of HTML with &quot;quoted quotes&quot; &amp; doubly quoted ampersands</p>"]
  }
 }]
}

This would allow, for example, HTML comments to be sandboxed inside iframes but still parsable as microformats.

I believe the correct processing would be to leave " entities as they are but to unescape any doubly-escaped ampersands.

Should rel-alternate parsing also pick up the type attribute? It’s fairly widely used, e.g. for ATOM feeds.

The fact that the parsed value of any element with .e-* is at a different level of escaping to the parsed values of p-*, dt-* etc. without any indication of how the property was parsed in the output is a security problem. For example:

input	output
<p class="h-card"> <span class="p-name">&lt;tag&gt;</span> </p>	{ "items": [ { "type": [ "h-card" ], "properties": { "name": [ "<tag>" ] } } ] }
<p class="h-card"> <span class="e-name">&lt;tag&gt;</span> </p>	{ "items": [ { "type": [ "h-card" ], "properties": { "name": [ "&lt;tag&gt;" ] } } ] }

• As a parser developer, the most straightforward way I can think of solving this is to add an option (enabled by default) which encodes HTML special characters on all non e-* properties, so the developer knows that all property values are going to be at the same level of escaping. --bw 20:00, 15 June 2013 (UTC)
  • Your suggestion of auto-HTML-encoding p-*/u-*/dt-* property values is the most sensible I think. I would NOT make it an option, as it makes sense write consistent microformats2 consumers. - Tantek 07:18, 5 July 2013 (UTC)
  • Can you think of any existing apps/consumers of microformats2 via the parser that would break? What would indieweb comments parsers do? - Tantek 07:18, 5 July 2013 (UTC)
    • The only breakage which might occur would be over-encoding of non e-* properties, but I’ll release this update as v0.2.0 and warn people about the changes. The worst thing which could happen is that some comments look a bit weird, as opposed to the current worst possible scenario of easy XSS attacks --bw 12:55, 5 July 2013 (UTC)
    • We should also decide exactly which characters get encoded — just angle brackets, or quotes/ampersands as well? --bw 12:55, 5 July 2013 (UTC)
    • I am not sure about this, it seems more like a helper function rather than a core feature of the parser. Personally I would like to store data as text and encode only when I am going to use and I known the format it is going to be use in. --Glenn Jones 9:54, 14 July 2013 (UTC)
    • After the discussion on the indiewebcamp IRC with Barnaby Walters I now understand the XSS issue that this change is trying to address. A rogue author could include HTML with scripts to execute a XSS attack. These could be masked by switch prefixes i.e. p-* to e-* on a well use property. As the consumer does not see the prefix in the JSON output they have no idea if a property will content HTML or text. I will update my two parsers and the test suite --Glenn Jones 8:02, 17 July 2013 (UTC)
  • So what about an author setting a property to e-* when it would normal be p-*, dt-* or u-* i.e.

<div class="h-card"><p class="e-name"><script> alert('xss test') </script></p></div>

Should we not encode e-* as well and the consumer can decode at their own risk --Glenn Jones 18:42, 21 July 2013 (UTC)

• The parsing rule 'else if br.p-x or hr.p-x, then return "" (empty string)' for p-* can cause any code consuming the API to become quite bloated. It means that you have test every array value to see if its an empty string. It is also unclear to me what the purpose of this mark-up pattern is for Glenn Jones
  • Upon reconsidering this, I agree with you, this is an unlikely use case. If a publisher wants to explicitly set an empty property "p-foo" they can simply write <span class="p-foo"></span> which looks explicit. Whereas BR and HR tags are often just presentational, so we should both not encourage usage of them for semantics, and anyone that did use them would be subject to likely loss of semantics upon a redesign (that got rid of those particular BR and HR tags). I'm going to remove them from the parsing spec. - Tantek 15:29, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

• The examples in the wiki microformats-2 pages such h-entry and h-entry had datetime without the 'T' delimiter between date and time. ie

<time class="dt-published" datetime="2013-06-13 12:00:00">13<sup>th</sup> June 2013</time>

I have updated the pages. As far as I known this is a new pattern for dates. Was it a mistake in the examples or is it a new datetime pattern.

• • The HTML5 "time" element, and "datetime" attribute allow for space " " as a separator between date and time as well as "T", thus we allow it for microformats as well. The " " separator is preferred as the date and time are more readable when separated by a space. The examples noted in those specs deliberately use this. - Tantek 18:48, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

see also

• microformats2