PRB: Internet Explorer Removes Quotes when Saving Documents as HTML Complete

ID: Q243254

The information in this article applies to:

Microsoft Internet Explorer (Programming) version 5

SYMPTOMS

When saving a Web page using Internet Explorer 5 Web Page Complete option, the quotes may be removed from the attribute tags within that page. This may also occur when saving the page directly from MSHTML using scripting or some other method.

RESOLUTION

If you would like to save a Web page in its original format, choose the option to save a page as "HTML Only".

STATUS

This behavior is by design.

MORE INFORMATION

When saving a Web page using the Web Page Complete option of Internet Explorer, the page has to be completely parsed and re-written to contain local paths for all page resources. As the page is re-written, it is saved in the most efficient form possible. According to the World Wide Web Consortiums (W3C) HTML 4.0 spec, the quotes around all attribute tags are recommended but not required:

"In certain cases, authors may specify the value of an attribute without any quotation marks. The attribute value may only contain letters (a-z and A-Z), digits (0-9), hyphens (ASCII decimal 45), and periods (ASCII decimal 46). We recommend using quotation marks even when it is possible to eliminate them."

When required, Internet Explorer will include the quotes in the page.

If you are looking use Internet Explorer as a parsing engine, you should consider using the DHTML Editing Control. This control does not remove the quote marks from HTML when saving files.

NOTE: HTML documents do not follow the strict rules of the XML specification and are rarely valid as XML documents without conversion. In particular, saving documents from Internet Explorer as Web Page Complete will usually generate HTML documents that are invalid XML, because XML requires all attributes to be quoted. Furthermore, there are a number of other concerns for systems attempting to parse HTML documents using an XML parser. The W3C is currently working on a reformulation of HTML as an XML application named XHTML to help solve these problems.

REFERENCES

For more information, see the following Web sites:

XHTML 1.0 Specification at the W3C

Additional query words:

Keywords : kbIE kbIE500
Version : WINDOWS:5
Platform : WINDOWS
Issue type : kbprb