Re: [author-guide] Character Entity References Chart

On Jul 22, 2008, at 8:26 AM, earlier I wrote (with a corrected typo):

> 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.
>>
>> 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>".

I should add that upon reviewing the latest draft[1], that is indeed  
what the draft says. The Doctype for HTML5 is "<!DOCTYPE html>".  
regardless of serialization. That means HTML5 processing applications  
will not be pointed to a DTD through a public identifier even in the  
XML serialization. Well technically section 2.1 says that a Doctype is  
not required by the draft while section 8.1 says that it is required  
by the draft: both normative. In any event section 8.1 says precisely  
that the doctype has to be "<!DOCTYPE html>" while XML says that the  
document has to have a doctype. Those two things taken together mean  
that an XML serialized HTML5 document has to have a doctype of "<! 
DOCTYPE html>", while a text/html serialized HTML5 document either  
does or doesn't require a doctype depending on whether the author  
follows section 2.1 or section 8.1.

In any event, none of this has anything to do with the topic of this  
thread: that is the requirement that HTML5 implementations handle the  
same character references even in the XML serialization. That topic  
has nothing to do with Doctype declarations nor with DTDs. It has to  
do with the prose of the HTML5 drat which right now makes no clear  
distinction that HTML5 implementations processing XML need not worry  
about the named character references compared to processing text/html.

Take care,
Rob

[1]: <http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/>

Received on Tuesday, 22 July 2008 11:20:39 UTC