[Bug 13409] Defining Entity references for characters in XHTML.

https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=13409

--- Comment #10 from David Carlisle <davidc@nag.co.uk> 2012-01-09 09:20:04 UTC ---
(In reply to comment #9)
> (In reply to comment #8)
> > Why not allow <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "about:any public id" SYSTEM "any arbitrary
> > url">
> 
> That wouldn't Degrade Gracefully in existing browsers that hard-code a handful
> of public ids (and that set of ids doesn't contain "about:any public id").


The situation has always been (because of the freedom offered in the XML spec)
that some browsers give fatal errors on documents that other browsers parse
correctly. So "Degrade Gracefully" is going to be hard to achieve in general.
Therefore it is a good thing that the html spec specifies how the resolution of
external dtd references should work, however the current specification makes no
sense as it states that to include the correct set of entity references you may
_not_ refer to those but must instead refer to various different, incompatible,
sets. At an absolute minimum there must be a way to refer to the current entity
set in a way that does not use the FPI of an older, incompatible set. Without
this it is more or less inevitable that documents will be corrupted while being
parsed by an xml system outside the browser.

More important than preserving the behaviour of legacy browsers is preserving
existing content, and having a mechanism going forward that allows the
specification of the correct set of entities in a way that works in browsers.

The current spec does not preserve the existing content (The xhtml versions
MathML2 and MathML3 specs which worked in IE and Firefox 3 break as both of
them supported SYSTEM ids of "mathml.dtd"). Because of the variability in
legacy behaviour noted above though, in this case I'd accept breaking existing
content if there was some acceptable thing to change it to.

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Received on Monday, 9 January 2012 09:22:18 UTC