Francesco, Your patch still doesn't allow one to add a multiline attribute values as Tomalak describes: "The catch: This leads to an actual data loss if I *wanted* to store newline characters in an attribute -- unless the newline characters are properly encoded. Encoding the newline characters is also valid and conforms to the spec, so the DOM implementation should do it." I'm not sure whether the proposed behavior is correct or desirable. Even if it is correct, it might introduce backwards incompatible changes in behavior. Here's a test case for trunk.