Fwd: Re: character entities using hex

Hi,

It seems there is a problem in the HTML4.decl shipped with
PR-html40-19990824 . I glanced at the www-html-editor archive
and didn't see this there already, so here it is.

-- 
Gerald Oskoboiny       <gerald@w3.org>  +1 617 253 2920
System Administrator   http://www.w3.org/People/Gerald/
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)      http://www.w3.org/

attached mail follows:

Ann Navarro <ann@webgeek.com> wrote:

> I've got a student who's attempted to use the hex representation for a few
> character entities, and the validator is throwing up an interesting error: 
> 
> http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fmembers.xoom.com%2F_XOOM%2Fne
> t_miner%2F02%2Fcharent.html

There's nothing wrong in this document.  This document is valid.

> eg: 
> 
>  <LI>Hexadecimal: <STRONG>f7</STRONG> &#xf7;
> 
>   Error: "XF7" is not a function name
> 
> 
> Aside from likely interoperability problems in using the hex version --
> what is the validation issue here? 

The SGML declaration used in the validator is broken, namely, failed
to support Web SGML Adoption. I thought we have fixed this problem [1]
long time ago, but the bug arises again.

The validator currently uses the following SGML declaration, which is
broken:

    http://validator.w3.org/sgml-lib/REC-html40-19980424/HTML4.decl

And even worse, PR-html40-19990824 failed to fix this problem as well,
despite this have been listed in the HTML 4.0 Specification Errata [2].
We MUST fix this problem.

[1] http://dev.w3.org/cvsweb/validator/htdocs/sgml-lib/REC-html40-971218/HTML4.decl?r1=1.1&r2=1.2
[2] http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/html40-updates/REC-html40-19980424-errata.html

Regards,
-- 
Masayasu Ishikawa / mimasa@w3.org
W3C - World Wide Web Consortium