- From: Bjoern Hoehrmann <derhoermi@gmx.net>
- Date: Fri, 01 Jul 2005 21:21:01 +0200
- To: "Richard Ishida" <ishida@w3.org>
- Cc: "GEO" <public-i18n-geo@w3.org>
* Richard Ishida wrote: >http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-escapes.html I think the document should note that using "character entities" is not interoperable and possibly dangerous. The HTML Working Group has been approached several times to clarify whether and how implementations are supposed to support the pre-defined entities if they do not read the external subset; the HTML Working Group so far refused to provide such clarification, so there are a number of old implementations that do not support use of them in XHTML documents at all (to the extend that some implementations incorrectly reject documents that use them) and current implementations that support them for some document types but not for others. Also note that per XML 1.0 Third Edition, It is [A violation of the rules of this specification] if an attribute value contains a reference to an entity for which no declaration has been read. [Conforming software MAY detect and report an error and MAY recover from [this error]]. So to the extend that it is possible to have some kind of XHTML document that uses "character entities" in attributes but the user agent does not support the document type and/or did not process the entity declaration, it is perfectly permissable for the user agent to act in unexpected ways for the document. Robust documents do not use "character entities" at all unless they are pre-defined in XML 1.0 or declared in the internal subset. The document should also link to the relevant requirements in Charmod Fundamentals. -- Björn Höhrmann · mailto:bjoern@hoehrmann.de · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de Weinh. Str. 22 · Telefon: +49(0)621/4309674 · http://www.bjoernsworld.de 68309 Mannheim · PGP Pub. KeyID: 0xA4357E78 · http://www.websitedev.de/
Received on Friday, 1 July 2005 19:21:12 UTC