[Bug 8606] ambiguous ampersand does not include character references

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=8606


Ian 'Hixie' Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
             Status|REOPENED                    |RESOLVED
         Resolution|                            |NEEDSINFO




--- Comment #3 from Ian 'Hixie' Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>  2010-02-14 02:55:29 ---
EDITOR'S RESPONSE: This is an Editor's Response to your comment. If you are
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Status: Did Not Understand Request
Change Description: no spec change
Rationale: I am completely at a loss as to what comment 2 is trying to say.

The concept of ambiguous ampersands is used to restrict what values "text" can
have. Its purpose is to make it non-conforming to have an ampersand followed by
something that would, when parsed, be confused for a character reference. As
such, the only characters that are allowed after & are space characters, "<"
characters, and other "&" characters. All other characters, including all the
characters that would form a character reference, are not allowed, and thus a &
followed by any such character (e.g. "a" or "#") is am ambiguous ampersand.

If we were to _exclude_ characters that formed character references, then this
would completely fail to achieve the stated goal. If "&" followed by "gt;" was
_not_ an ambiguous ampersand, then there'd be no way to distinguish the text
consisting of the four characters "&", "g", "t", ";" from a single character
reference "&gt;", and yet both would be legal.

This is why ambiguous ampersands are defined as they are.


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Received on Sunday, 14 February 2010 02:55:31 UTC