ISSUE-5 (Unexpanded Entities): Wording for the Treatment of Unexpanded Entity References and Entity Replacement Markup [Element Traversal]

ISSUE-5 (Unexpanded Entities): Wording for the Treatment of Unexpanded Entity References and Entity Replacement Markup [Element Traversal]

http://www.w3.org/2008/webapps/track/issues/

Raised by: Doug Schepers
On product: Element Traversal

In <http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-webapi/2007Mar/0065.html>, Björn said, "you have to define how the method behave in case of unexpanded entity references and entity replacement markup."

In response, the spec was changed to say, "For the purpose of ElementTraversal, an entity reference node which represents an element must be treated as an element node."

Anne remarked that that passage wasn't clear, in <http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-webapi/2008Feb/0185.html>, saying "Does this mean that an EntityReference node also implements this interface? I suggest dropping this sentence or stating that this interface assumes that all entities are normalized away or something."

Doug defended the passage, saying "I'm reluctant to mandate how a UA implements the solution, whether by implementing this interface on the entity reference node or only on the expanded resulting DOM, because I don't know how every UA does so.  I don't think it effects interoperability, so I prefer to leave it as is." in <http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-webapi/2008Feb/0187.html>.

This response did not satisfy Anne (see <http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-webapi/2008Feb/0188.html>), while Doug replied (in <>), "I'm not sure how I can make it more clear without imposing undue restrictions on UAs."  Anne questioned how that might be tested, in <http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-webapi/2008Feb/0190.html>.

Simon Pieters suggests wording similar to HTML5, in <http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-webapi/2008Feb/0191.html>.

The open question is whether this would constrain UAs to behave a particular way regarding entities, which might conflict with existing UAs.  If no evidence is presented to the contrary, the spec might be changed in that way.

Note that this is an issue for any interface specification, so a uniform solution should be decided.

Received on Tuesday, 17 June 2008 06:02:47 UTC