<META NAME="..." CONTENT="...">

Misha Wolf (misha.wolf@reuters.com)
Fri, 21 Feb 1997 17:08:57 +0000 (GMT) 

Date: Fri, 21 Feb 1997 17:08:57 +0000 (GMT)
From: Misha Wolf <misha.wolf@reuters.com>
Subject: <META NAME="..." CONTENT="...">
To: www-html <www-html@w3.org>
Message-Id: <0157081721021997/A02656/REDMS2/11B2AC483800*@MHS>

I have two questions about HTML 3.2 and have looked at the HTML 3.2 
Reference Specification but haven't found or understood the answers.  Both 
questions concern META elements like:

   <META NAME="Author" CONTENT="Dave Raggett">

1. The field containing "Author" above.

Is this field allowed to contain any characters other than "a" to "z", "A" 
to "Z", "." and "-"?  I have been told that HTML 3.2 is less restrictive in 
this area than HTML 2.0.  Is this so?  Was it so in some earlier draft?

2. The field containing "Dave Raggett" above.

HTML 3.2 defines this as CDATA and says:

   SGML entities in PCDATA content or in CDATA attributes are expanded by 
   the parser, e.g. &#233; is expanded to the ISO Latin-1 character decimal 
   233 (a lower case letter e with an acute accent). This could also have 
   been written as a named character entity, e.g. &eacute;. The & character 
   can be included in its own right using the named character entity &amp;. 

ISO 8879-1986 (SGML) appears to say that CDATA, unlike RCDATA, is not 
allowed to contain entities.  Can anyone shed light on this apparent 
anomaly, please?

Many thanks,
Misha