Re: HTML5 DOCTYPE and ENTITY declarations

On Fri, 02 Sep 2011 01:03:08 +0200, John Boyer <boyerj@ca.ibm.com> wrote:

> Dear Working Group,
>
> In Section 8.1.1 of [1], the allowable DOCTYPE declarations for HTML5 are
> given.  There is a  highly recommended shortest version as well as some
> legacy and obsolete alternatives.  However, none of the alternatives seem
> to allow an author to define entities to be used within the document.  Is
> this intentional or an oversight?
>
> [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/syntax.html#the-doctype

It is intentional. Note that this section only applies to text/html  
content.


> As an example, it seems that an internal dtd subset that looks like this
> should be admissible:
>
> <!DOCTYPE html [
>   <!ENTITY ent "Big mobile tree">
> ]>
>
> Which would then allow &ent; to be used in the HTML content.

The HTML parser does not support this.


> Particularly for the XML syntax variant served out under application/xml
> or application/xhtml+xml, it seems it would be challenging to turn off  
> the
> ability to define and use entities as the mechanism is built into the
> underlying XML parser.

It is allowed in XML (see the section "The XHTML syntax").


> However, I am asking specifically about whether
> the above declaration is also allowed in non-XML content served as
> text/html?

No.

-- 
Simon Pieters
Opera Software

Received on Friday, 2 September 2011 07:12:16 UTC