Re: [author-guide] Character Entity References Chart

Hi Lachlan,

On Jul 21, 2008, at 4:32 PM, Lachlan Hunt wrote:

>
> Robert J Burns wrote:
>> Are we planing to fork the named character entities in the two  
>> different
>> serializations? I missed that entirely. Or Dean are you just  
>> concluding
>> that because we do not plan to provide a machine readable XML
>> application definition that it implies no handling of entities? To me
>> those should be separate issues. Even without a machine readable
>> definition (RelaxNG, DTD, etc), we should still expect XHTML5
>> implementations to handle the same entity references (though  
>> necessarily
>> well-formed entity references in XHTML5).
>
> XML requires validating parsers to be used in order to use entity
> references other than those 5 predefined by XML.  Without an official
> DTD, no other references can be reliably used in XHTML 5.  Even if you
> provide your own custom DTD and DOCTYPE, most browsers don't use
> validating parsers and so won't be able to dereference the entity
> references.  If you really want to use named entity references, the  
> only
> workaround is to use one of the existing XHTML or MathML DOCTYPEs that
> are recognised by browsers and allow them to recognise the relevant
> entities.

That is not my understanding of XMLs requirements. Browser  
implementors apparently share my understanding XML and not yours since  
some already handle HTML entities within XML serialized HTML and as  
you already admit, they do not have validating parsers. I think it is  
a stretch to read the XML recommendation in your way in any event. XML  
also does not require a DTD. Other document definitions are acceptable  
(presumably the prose of the HTML5 recommendation could count as one  
such document definition). The XML recommendation provides different  
requirements for processors which retrieve and parse the document  
definition from those that do not, but it doesn't require the document  
definition to be in a particular form (like a DTD for example).

It would be strange if authors of XHTML1 and XHTML2 could use entity  
references but authors of XHTML5 could not (to say nothing of such a  
bizarre serialization difference within HTML5 itself).

Finally, if you're reading was correct would we really want to  
stubbornly refuse to provide a machine readable document definition  
when that would be a simple way to keep some consistency between the  
two serializations. As I said in my earlier message. I think these  
should be separate issues, but your reading of the XML recommendation  
would collapse the two issues into one.

Take care,
Rob

Received on Monday, 21 July 2008 14:29:48 UTC