- From: Christopher R. Maden <crism@exemplary.net>
- Date: Thu, 21 Oct 1999 12:45:49 -0700
- To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
[In reply to Gregory Rosmaita] Short answer: always use a semicolon. It's always right and never wrong. What you tell your students is useful, and I don't see a need to modify it. But what I was saying to Leonard is that, per ISO 8879 (SGML), an entity reference can be ended with a semicolon or record end (RE, SGML's way of referring to the end of a line). However, if neither is present, the parser will accept all of the name characters after the ampersand, and stop when it comes to something that isn't a name character. Name characters are letters, numbers, the hyphen and the period. In your example, AT&T, the name characters following the ampersand are a-m-p-T, so there is a reference to the undefined entity "ampT". Many browsers incorrectly interpret this; Lynx is not among them. But in a URL with ampersands, you're more likely to run into a non-name character such as = or " than you are to run into a semicolon or end of line. Entity recognition will (properly) stop with those characters. -Chris -- Christopher R. Maden, Solutions Architect Exemplary Technologies One Embarcadero Center, Ste. 2405 San Francisco, CA 94111
Received on Thursday, 21 October 1999 15:47:16 UTC