Re: [author-guide] Character Entity References Chart

On Jul 22, 2008, at 03:45, Karl Dubost wrote:

>> Without an official DTD, no other references can be reliably used  
>> in XHTML 5.  Even if you provide your own custom DTD and DOCTYPE,  
>> most browsers don't use validating parsers and so won't be able to  
>> dereference the entity references.
>
> That is a false assumption. Browsers *can*, if they implement it,  
> deference the *named* entity references.

Implementing it is not feasible.

  * It would cause a massive DDoS attack on www.w3.org.
  * It would make www.w3.org a single point of failure for the Web.
  * It would be bad for XML parsing performance.
  * It would break compatibility with existing content (IIRC MIT  
courseware, for example) that refers to a DTD that is not namespace- 
well-formed (i.e. has colons in PI targets).
  * New documents authored with the assumption that DTDs get fetched  
would break very ungracefully in existing Gecko and WebKit instances.

http://hsivonen.iki.fi/no-dtd/

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen@iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/

Received on Tuesday, 22 July 2008 07:57:33 UTC