Re: XHTML character entity support

On Nov 3, 2009, at 17:06, Shelley Powers wrote:

> I'm going to focus on the relevant part of this discussion to the HTML
> WG: there are rules defined for how undefined entities are handled,
> and these rules defined in the XML specification. There may be some
> issues of interpretation, but such issues are specific to the XML
> spec, not the HTML5 spec.
>
> As such, no further explanations or additional specifications are
> necessary in HTML5.
>
> Am I correct in this?

Not in my opinion. If predictably uniform behavior between UAs is
wanted and if we want to make it non-mysterious for implementors how
to performantly parse application/xhtml+xml content written for
browsers, this WG should specify normative entity resolver behavior
(i.e. mappings from public id and system id pairs onto streams).

As a practical matter, if I'm using SAX in Java, I can't get a
browser-
style EntityResolver off-the-shelf as part of a common org.apache
package. (Or maybe I could but I'm unaware.)

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