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

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

--- Comment #13 from David Carlisle <davidc@nag.co.uk> 2012-01-13 23:46:54 UTC ---
(In reply to comment #11)
> I'm happy to add new DTDs to the list; all you have to do is show that the URL
> you want to add already works in the majority of deployed browsers.


Hicie, that's not really a reasonable precondition:-)

Deployed "current" browsers are converging on what it says in the spec, so
finding one, let alone a "majority"  that does something different is hard (all
pre-html5 browsers did things differently from the spec and differently from
each other so "majority" usage doesn't really apply there either). Conversely
_all_ non-browser xml parsers will, if you specify one of the DTDs listed in
the HTML spec, load the DTDs so specified; which will mean that they load
different incompatible definitions for the entities, thus silent data
corruption can occur.

It is almost inevitable that xhtml documents will also be parsed by non-browser
xml tools (otherwise you'd just use html) thus it's imperative that there be a
way of specifying a document that is parsed with the current entity set in both
browser and non browser use.

>  To do that,
> please simply provide trivial test cases that use the DTD you want to have
> supported.

The example of the MathML spec has been given several times already, that
parsed interoperably with IE and Firefox (and amaya and netscape) thus all
MathML-aware browsers of its era. It's notable that this does not have a PUBLIC
ID at all (so hard to fit into your current static list of PUBLIC Ids)
It had a SYSTEM id to "mathml.dtd" this worked in IE as it loads external DTD
and worked in netscape/firefox as it recognised SYSTEM URLs ending in mathml in
addition to certain magic public IDs, to load its mathml support.

> It's not clear to me from this bug so far what exactly it is you
> want changed in the spec.

As stated earlier what I think would be best if the fixed list of PUBLIC Ids
were removed from the spec and instead the spec should state that _any_
external dtd be resolved to the data url of the entity definitions.
However I have asked for that before and you seem to keep pushing back on that,
however at a minimum there has to be some way of specifying an HTML-compatible
entity set so that the file is not corrupted when parsed by an off-browser xml
parser. Thus the simplest minimal (but far from optimal) change that could be
made to the spec would be to add the PUBLIC id for the html/mathml entity set.
ie the one at

http://www.w3.org/2003/entities/2007/htmlmathml-f.ent

which claims it has the PUBLIC ID

    Public identifier: -//W3C//ENTITIES HTML MathML Set//EN//XML

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Received on Friday, 13 January 2012 23:47:05 UTC