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The Tangled Web
book

The Tangled Web

by Michal Zalewski
November 2011
Intermediate to advanced
320 pages
10h 18m
English
No Starch Press
Content preview from The Tangled Web

Understanding HTML Parser Behavior

The fundamentals of HTML syntax outlined in the previous sections are usually enough to understand the meaning of well-formed HTML and XHTML documents. When the XHTML dialect is used, there is little more to the story: The minimal fault-tolerance of the parser means that anomalous syntax almost always leads simply to a parsing error. Alas, the picture is very different with traditional, laid-back HTML parsers, which aggressively second-guess the intent of the page developer even in very ambiguous or potentially harmful situations.

Since an accurate understanding of user-supplied markup is essential to designing many types of security filters, let’s have a quick look at some of these behaviors and quirks. To begin, ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781593273880Errata Page