htmlpurifier/docs/spec.txt

HTML Purifier Specification
  by Edward Z. Yang

== Introduction ==

There are a number of ad hoc HTML filtering solutions out there on the web
(some examples including HTML_Safe, kses and SafeHtmlChecker.class.php) that
claim to filter HTML properly, preventing malicious JavaScript and layout
breaking HTML from getting through the parser.  None of them, however,
demonstrates a thorough knowledge of neither the DTD that defines the HTML
nor the caveats of HTML that cannot be expressed by a DTD.  Configurable
filters (such as kses or PHP's built-in striptags() function) have trouble
validating the contents of attributes and can be subject to security attacks
due to poor configuration.  Other filters take the naive approach of
blacklisting known threats and tags, failing to account for the introduction
of new technologies, new tags, new attributes or quirky browser behavior.

However, HTML Purifier takes a different approach, one that doesn't use
specification-ignorant regexes or narrow blacklists.  HTML Purifier will
decompose the whole document into tokens, and rigorously process the tokens by:
removing non-whitelisted elements, transforming bad practice tags like <font>
into <span>, properly checking the nesting of tags and their children and
validating all attributes according to their RFCs.

To my knowledge, there is nothing like this on the web yet.  Not even MediaWiki,
which allows an amazingly diverse mix of HTML and wikitext in its documents,
gets all the nesting quirks right.  Existing solutions hope that no JavaScript
will slip through, but either do not attempt to ensure that the resulting
output is valid XHTML or send the HTML through a draconic XML parser (and yet
still get the nesting wrong: SafeHtmlChecker.class.php does not prevent <a>
tags from being nested within each other).

This document seeks to detail the inner workings of HTML Purifier.  The first
draft was drawn up after two rough code sketches and the implementation of a
forgiving lexer.  You may also be interested in the unit tests located in the
tests/ folder, which provide a living document on how exactly the filter deals
with malformed input.

In summary:

1. Parse document into an array of tag and text tokens (Lexer)
2. Remove all elements not on whitelist and transform certain other elements
   into acceptable forms (i.e. <font>)
3. Make document well formed while helpfully taking into account certain quirks,
   such as the fact that <p> tags traditionally are closed by other block-level
   elements.
4. Run through all nodes and check children for proper order (especially
   important for tables).
5. Validate attributes according to more restrictive definitions based on the
   RFCs.
6. Translate back into a string. (Generator)

HTML Purifier is best suited for documents that require a rich array of
HTML tags.  Things like blog comments are, in all likelihood, most appropriately
written in an extremely restrictive set of markup that doesn't require
all this functionality (or not written in HTML at all).



== STAGE 1 - parsing ==

    Status: A (see source, mainly internals and UTF-8)

The Lexer (currently we have three choices) handles parsing into Tokens.

Here are the mappings for Lexer_PEARSax3

* Start(name, attributes)       is openHandler
* End(name)                     is closeHandler
* Empty(name, attributes)       is openHandler   (is in array of empties)
* Data(parse(text))             is dataHandler
* Comment(text)                 is escapeHandler (has leading -)
* Data(text)                    is escapeHandler (has leading [, CDATA)

Ignorable/not being implemented (although we probably want to output them raw):
* ProcessingInstructions(text)  is piHandler
* JavaOrASPInstructions(text)   is jaspHandler



== STAGE 2 - remove foreign elements ==

    Status: A- (transformations need to be implemented)

At this point, the parser needs to start knowing about the DTD. Since we
hold everything in an associative $info array, if it's set, it's valid, and
we can include. Otherwise zap it, or attempt to figure out what they meant.
<stronf>? A misspelling of <strong>! This feature may be too sugary though.

While we're at it, we can change the Processing Instructions and Java/ASP
Instructions into data blocks, scratch comment blocks, change CharacterData
into Data (although I don't see why we can't do that at the start).

One last thing: the remove foreign elements has to do the element
transformations, from FONT to SPAN, etc.



== STAGE 3 - make well formed ==

    Status: A- (not as good as possible)

Now we step through the whole thing and correct nesting issues. Most of the
time, it's making sure the tags match up, but there's some trickery going on
for HTML's quirks. They are:

* Set of tags that close P
        'address', 'blockquote', 'dd',      'dir',       'div', 
        'dl',      'dt',         'h1',     'h2',      'h3',        'h4', 
        'h5',      'h6',         'hr',
        'ol',     'p',       'pre', 
        'table',   'ul' 
* Li closes li
* more?

We also want to do translations, like from FONT to SPAN with STYLE.



== STAGE 4 - check nesting ==

    Status: B (table custom definition needs to be implemented)

We know that the document is now well formed. The tokenizer should now take
things in nodes: when you hit a start tag, keep on going until you get its
ending tag, and then handle everything inside there. Fortunantely, no
fancy recursion is necessary as going to the next node is as simple as
scrolling to the next start tag.

Suppose we have a node and encounter a problem with one of its children.
Depending on the complexity of the rule, we will either delete the children,
or delete the entire node itself.

The simplest type of rule is zero or more valid elements, denoted like:

  ( el1 | el2 | el3 )*

The next simplest is with one or more valid elements:

  ( li )+

And then you have complex cases:

 table (caption?, (col*|colgroup*), thead?, tfoot?, (tbody+|tr+))
 map ((%block; | form | %misc;)+ | area+)
 html (head, body)
 head (%head.misc;,
     ((title, %head.misc;, (base, %head.misc;)?) |
      (base, %head.misc;, (title, %head.misc;))))

Each of these has to be dealt with. Case 1 is a joy, because you can zap
as many as you want, but you'll never actually have to kill the node. Two
and three need the entire node to be killed if you have a problem. This
can be problematic, as the missing node might cause its parent node to now
be incorrect. Granted, it's unlikely, and I'm fairly certain that HTML, let
alone the simplified set I'm allowing will have this problem, but it's worth
checking for.

The way, I suppose, one would check for it, is whenever a node is removed,
scroll to it's parent start, and re-evaluate it. Make sure you're able to do
that with minimal code repetition.

EDITOR'S NOTE: this behavior is not implemented by default, because the
default configuration has a setup that ensures that cascading node removals
will never happen. However, there will be warning signs in case someone tries
to hack it further.

The most complex case can probably be done by using some fancy regexp
expressions and transformations. However, it doesn't seem right that, say,
a stray <b> in a <table> can cause the entire table to be removed. Fixing it,
however, may be too difficult (or not, see below).

This code was excerpted from the PEAR class XML_DTD. It implements regexp
checking.

--

// # This actually does the validation

// Validate the order of the children
if (!$was_error && count($dtd_children)) {
    $children_list = implode(',', $children);
    $regex = $this->dtd->getPcreRegex($name);
    if (!preg_match('/^'.$regex.'$/', $children_list)) {
        $dtd_regex = $this->dtd->getDTDRegex($name);
        $this->_errors("In element <$name> the children list found:\n'$children_list', ".
                       "does not conform the DTD definition: '$dtd_regex'", $lineno);
    }
}

--

// # This figures out the PcreRegex

//$ch is a string of the allowed childs
$children = preg_split('/([^#a-zA-Z0-9_.-]+)/', $ch, -1, PREG_SPLIT_NO_EMPTY);
// check for parsed character data special case
if (in_array('#PCDATA', $children)) {
    $content = '#PCDATA';
    if (count($children) == 1) {
        $children = array();
        break;
    }
}
// $children is not used after this

$this->dtd['elements'][$elem_name]['child_validation_dtd_regex'] = $ch;
// Convert the DTD regex language into PCRE regex format
$reg = str_replace(',', ',?', $ch);
$reg = preg_replace('/([#a-zA-Z0-9_.-]+)/', '(,?\\0)', $reg);
$this->dtd['elements'][$elem_name]['child_validation_pcre_regex'] = $reg;

--

We can probably loot and steal all of this. This brilliance of this code is
amazing. I'm lovin' it!

So, the way we define these cases should work like this:

class ChildDef with validateChildren($children_tags)

The function needs to parse into nodes, then into the regex array.
It can result in one of three actions: the removal of the entire parent node,
replacement of all of the original child tags with a new set of child
tags which it returns, or no changes. They shall be denoted as, respectively,

Remove entire parent node    = false
Replace child tags with this = array of tags
No changes                   = true

If we remove the entire parent node, we must scroll back to the parent of the
parent.

--

Another few problems: EXCLUSIONS!

a
    must not contain other a elements.
pre
    must not contain the img, object, big, small, sub, or sup elements.
button
    must not contain the input, select, textarea, label, button, form, fieldset,
    iframe or isindex elements.
label
    must not contain other label elements.
form
    must not contain other form elements. 

Normative exclusions straight from the horses mouth. These are SGML style,
not XML style, so we need to modify the ruleset slightly. However, the DTD
may have done this for us already.

--

Also, what do we do with elements if they're not allowed somewhere? We need
some sort of default behavior. I reckon that we should be allowed to:

1. Delete the node
2. Translate it into text (not okay for areas that don't allow #PCDATA)
3. Move the node to somewhere where it is okay

What complicates the matter is that Firefox has the ability to construct
DOMs and render invalid nestings of elements (like <b><div>asdf</div></b>).
This means that behavior for stray pcdata in ul/ol is undefined. Behavior
with data in a table gets bubbled to the start of the table (assuming
that we actually custom-make the table child validation class).

So... I say delete the node when PCDATA isn't allowed (or the regex is too
complicated to determine where PCDATA could be inserted), and translate the node
to text when PCDATA is allowed.

--

Note that generic child definitions are not usually desirable: we should
implement custom handlers for each one that specify the stuff correctly.

== STAGE 4 - check attributes ==

    STATUS: N (not started)

While we're doing all this nesting hocus-pocus, attributes are also being
checked. The reason why we need this to be done with the nesting stuff
is if a REQUIRED attribute is not there, we might need to kill the tag (or
replace it with data). Fortunantely, this is rare enough that we only have
to worry about it for certain things:

* ! bdo - dir > replace with span, preserve attributes
* basefont - size
* param - name
* applet - width, height
* ! img - src, alt > if only alt is missing, insert filename, else remove img
* map - id
* area - alt
* form - action
* optgroup - label
* textarea - rows, cols

As you can see, only two of them we would remotely consider for our simplified
tag set. But each has a different set of challenges. For the img tag, we'd
have to be careful about deleting it. If we do hit a snag, we can supply
a default "blank" image.

So after that's all said and done, each of the different types of content
inside the attributes needs to be handled differently.

ContentType(s)  [RFC2045]
Charset(s)      [RFC2045]
LanguageCode    [RFC3066] (NMTOKEN)
Character       [XML][2.2] (a single character)
Number          /^\d+$/
LinkTypes       [HTML][6.12] <space>
MediaDesc       [HTML][6.13] <comma>
URI/UriList     [RFC2396] <space>
Datetime        (ISO date format)
Script          ...
StyleSheet      [CSS] (complex)
Text            CDATA
FrameTarget     NMTOKEN
Length          (pixel, percentage) (?:px suffix allowed?)
MultiLength     (pixel, percentage, or relative)
Pixels          (integer)
// map attributes omitted
ImgAlign        (top|middle|bottom|left|right)
Color           #NNNNNN, #NNN or color name (translate it
    Black  = #000000    Green  = #008000
    Silver = #C0C0C0    Lime   = #00FF00
    Gray   = #808080    Olive  = #808000
    White  = #FFFFFF    Yellow = #FFFF00
    Maroon = #800000    Navy   = #000080
    Red    = #FF0000    Blue   = #0000FF
    Purple = #800080    Teal   = #008080
    Fuchsia= #FF00FF    Aqua   = #00FFFF
// plus some directly defined in the spec

Everything else is either ID, or defined as a certain set of values.

Unless we use reflection (which then we have to make sure the attribute exists),
we probably want to have a function like...

  validate($type, $value) where $type is like ContentType or Number

and then pass it to a switch.

The final problem is CSS. Get intimate with the syntax here:
http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/syndata.html and also note the "bad" CSS elements
that HTML_Safe defines to help determine a whitelist.

== PART 5 - stringify ==

    Status: A+ (done completely!)

Should be fairly simple as long as we delegate to appropriate functions.
It's probably too much trouble to indent the stuff properly, so just output
stuff raw.