Re: [author-guide] Character Entity References Chart

Hi Lachlan,

On Jul 22, 2008, at 5:32 AM, Lachlan Hunt wrote:

>
> Karl Dubost wrote:
>> Le 21 juil. 2008 à 22:32, Lachlan Hunt a écrit :
>>> 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.
>> That is a false assumption. Browsers *can*, if they implement it,  
>> deference the *named* entity references.
>
> Just because they theoretically could doesn't make my statement  
> false because browser *don't* implement it like that, and they won't.

Yes they do implement it like that: at least WebKit and Mozilla do.

>> Your work, Lachlan, could be the start of a nice test suite to  
>> specifically do an implementation report for each user agents and  
>> see which named entities are supported in text/html AND application/ 
>> xhtml+xml.
>
> Here is a test for every named character reference in HTML5 for text/ 
> html only.  This includes the non-conforming legacy character  
> references without the trailing semi-colon as well.
>
> http://lachy.id.au/dev/markup/tests/html5/charref/
>
> I will try and make a separate set of tests to make sure that none  
> of the non-legacy entity refs work without the semi-colon later.

These test have nothing to do with the present discussion of the XML  
serialization.

> It is not worth testing these in application/xhtml+xml because there  
> is no XHTML5 DTD, and so only the predefined ones will work.

Again, you're conflating DTDs with the specification of an XML  
application. There is no requirement that XML applications be  
specified with DTDs, though it certainly facilitates that. The DocType  
for the XML serialization of HTML5 should be the same as the DocType  
for the text/html serialization: namely "<DOCTYPE html>".

A lot has happened since the XML 1.0 recommendation: namespaces and  
other schema languages to name two important ones. DocTypes simply do  
not provide a sufficient means to differentiate the processing of one  
branch of an XML document from another (though namespace mechanisms do  
provide sufficient means to do so). It is the namespace in a  
namespaced document that should guide the processing of a each branch  
of the XML tree and not a DocType. So there's really no need for us to  
concern ourselves in HTML5 with DTDs at all. And the minimal DocType  
declaration for the text/html serialization is all that we require for  
the XML serialization as well.

Take care,
Rob

Received on Tuesday, 22 July 2008 05:27:35 UTC