Re: [author-guide] Character Entity References Chart

Henri Sivonen wrote:
> 
> On Jul 22, 2008, at 03:45, Karl Dubost wrote:
> 
>>> 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.
> 
> Implementing it is not feasible.
> 
>  * It would cause a massive DDoS attack on www.w3.org.
>  * It would make www.w3.org a single point of failure for the Web.
>  * It would be bad for XML parsing performance.
>  * It would break compatibility with existing content (IIRC MIT 
> courseware, for example) that refers to a DTD that is not 
> namespace-well-formed (i.e. has colons in PI targets).
>  * New documents authored with the assumption that DTDs get fetched 
> would break very ungracefully in existing Gecko and WebKit instances.

Not that I'm fan of DTDs, but you can solve those problems by using XML 
catalogs:

http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/download.php/14809/xml-catalogs.html

Each browser then will have local copies of well known DTDs and will 
fetch only custom created ones.

					Jirka

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