docs/enduser-id.html

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   9 <title>IDs - HTML Purifier</title>
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  12
  13 <h1 class="subtitled">IDs</h1>
  14 <div class="subtitle">What they are, why you should(n't) wear them, and how to deal with it</div>
  15
  16 <div id="filing">Filed under End-User</div>
  17 <div id="index">Return to the <a href="index.html">index</a>.</div>
  18 <div id="home"><a href="http://htmlpurifier.org/">HTML Purifier</a> End-User Documentation</div>
  19
  20 <p>Prior to HTML Purifier 1.2.0, this library blithely accepted user input that
  21 looked like this:</p>
  22
  23 <pre>&lt;a id=&quot;fragment&quot;&gt;Anchor&lt;/a&gt;</pre>
  24
  25 <p>...presenting an attractive vector for those that would destroy standards
  26 compliance: simply set the ID to one that is already used elsewhere in the
  27 document and voila: validation breaks.  There was a half-hearted attempt to
  28 prevent this by allowing users to blacklist IDs, but I suspect that no one
  29 really bothered, and thus, with the release of 1.2.0, IDs are now <em>removed</em>
  30 by default.</p>
  31
  32 <p>IDs, however, are quite useful functionality to have, so if users start
  33 complaining about broken anchors you'll probably want to turn them back on
  34 with %HTML.EnableAttrID. But before you go mucking around with the config
  35 object, it's probably worth to take some precautions to keep your page
  36 validating. Why?</p>
  37
  38 <ol>
  39    <li>Standards-compliant pages are good</li>
  40    <li>Duplicated IDs interfere with anchors.  If there are two id="foobar"s in a
  41    document, which spot does a browser presented with the fragment #foobar go
  42    to? Most browsers opt for the first appearing ID, making it impossible
  43    to references the second section. Similarly, duplicated IDs can hijack
  44    client-side scripting that relies on the IDs of elements.</li>
  45 </ol>
  46
  47 <p>You have (currently) four ways of dealing with the problem.</p>
  48
  49
  50
  51 <h2 class="subtitled">Blacklisting IDs</h2>
  52 <div class="subsubtitle">Good for pages with single content source and stable templates</div>
  53
  54 <p>Keeping in terms with the
  55 <acronym title="Keep It Simple, Stupid">KISS</acronym> principle, let us
  56 deal with the most obvious solution: preventing users from using any IDs that
  57 appear elsewhere on the document.  The method is simple:</p>
  58
  59 <pre>$config->set('HTML', 'EnableAttrID', true);
  60 $config->set('Attr', 'IDBlacklist' array(
  61     'list', 'of', 'attributes', 'that', 'are', 'forbidden'
  62 ));</pre>
  63
  64 <p>That being said, there are some notable drawbacks.  First of all, you have to
  65 know precisely which IDs are being used by the HTML surrounding the user code.
  66 This is easier said than done: quite often the page designer and the system
  67 coder work separately, so the designer has to constantly be talking with the
  68 coder whenever he decides to add a new anchor.  Miss one and you open yourself
  69 to possible standards-compliance issues.</p>
  70
  71 <p>Furthermore, this position becomes untenable when a single web page must hold
  72 multiple portions of user-submitted content.  Since there's obviously no way
  73 to find out before-hand what IDs users will use, the blacklist is helpless.
  74 And even since HTML Purifier validates each segment seperately, perhaps doing
  75 so at different times, it would be extremely difficult to dynamically update
  76 the blacklist inbetween runs.</p>
  77
  78 <p>Finally, simply destroying the ID is extremely un-userfriendly behavior: after
  79 all, they might have simply specified a duplicate ID by accident.</p>
  80
  81 <p>Thus, we get to our second method.</p>
  82
  83
  84
  85 <h2 class="subtitled">Namespacing IDs</h2>
  86 <div class="subsubtitle">Lazy developer's way, but needs user education</div>
  87
  88 <p>This method, too, is quite simple: add a prefix to all user IDs. With this
  89 code:</p>
  90
  91 <pre>$config->set('HTML', 'EnableAttrID', true);
  92 $config->set('Attr', 'IDPrefix', 'user_');</pre>
  93
  94 <p>...this:</p>
  95
  96 <pre>&lt;a id=&quot;foobar&quot;&gt;Anchor!&lt;/a&gt;</pre>
  97
  98 <p>...turns into:</p>
  99
 100 <pre>&lt;a id=&quot;user_foobar&quot;&gt;Anchor!&lt;/a&gt;</pre>
 101
 102 <p>As long as you don't have any IDs that start with user_, collisions are
 103 guaranteed not to happen.  The drawback is obvious: if a user submits
 104 id=&quot;foobar&quot;, they probably expect to be able to reference their page with
 105 #foobar. You'll have to tell them, &quot;No, that doesn't work, you have to add
 106 user_ to the beginning.&quot;</p>
 107
 108 <p>And yes, things get hairier.  Even with a nice prefix, we still have done
 109 nothing about multiple HTML Purifier outputs on one page.  Thus, we have
 110 a second configuration value to piggy-back off of: %Attr.IDPrefixLocal:</p>
 111
 112 <pre>$config->set('Attr', 'IDPrefixLocal', 'comment' . $id . '_');</pre>
 113
 114 <p>This new attributes does nothing but append on to regular IDPrefix, but is
 115 special in that it is volatile: it's value is determined at run-time and
 116 cannot possibly be cordoned into, say, a .ini config file.  As for what to
 117 put into the directive, is up to you, but I would recommend the ID number
 118 the text has been assigned in the database.  Whatever you pick, however, it
 119 has to be unique and stable for the text you are validating.  Note, however,
 120 that we require that %Attr.IDPrefix be set before you use this directive.</p>
 121
 122 <p>And also remember: the user has to know what this prefix is too!</p>
 123
 124
 125
 126 <h2>Abstinence</h2>
 127
 128 <p>You may not want to bother. That's okay too, just don't enable IDs.</p>
 129
 130 <p>Personally, I would take this road whenever user-submitted content would be
 131 possibly be shown together on one page.  Why a blog comment would need to use
 132 anchors is beyond me.</p>
 133
 134
 135
 136 <h2>Denial</h2>
 137
 138 <p>To revert back to pre-1.2.0 behavior, simply:</p>
 139
 140 <pre>$config->set('HTML', 'EnableAttrID', true);</pre>
 141
 142 <p>Don't come crying to me when your page mysteriously stops validating, though.</p>
 143
 144 <div id="version">$Id$</div>
 145
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