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Indeed, if you're generating the HTML/XML stream as tokens instead of as plain text, the context-sensitive quoting can be done automatically.

When I do have to generate HTML as text I usually go with escaping &<>"' and I double quote all attribute values. Isn't this best practice?

Is there anyone using 's or (eek) unquoted HTML attributes at all?

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We use unquoted attributes at Google sometimes. It's for bandwidth/latency-saving reasons. They're usually limited to literal template text (i.e. class names, width/height attributes, etc.) and not user-generated text.

I use single-quoted attributes on a regular basis when editing XML (and HTML, which I edit as XML) documents by hand, mainly because it conserves a noticeable amount of Shift keying on the US keyboard layout. If necessary I mechanically translate them into double quotes ex post facto, but I don't bother if I can assume a style of parser that will handle the single quotes.

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