Re: Fwd: XHTML character entity support

On Tue, Nov 3, 2009 at 3:28 AM, Simon Pieters <simonp@opera.com> wrote:
> On Mon, 02 Nov 2009 20:41:24 +0100, John Cowan <cowan@ccil.org> wrote:
>
>> Simon Pieters scripsit:
>>
>>> What is being discussed is not adding predefined entities. What is being
>>> discussed is making certain doctypes map to DTDs that contain just entity
>>> declarations (which is what Firefox, WebKit and Opera do today).
>>
>> Well, any non-validating parser is free to do that today.  (It's not quite
>> clear to me from the XML Rec whether a validating parser is compelled
>> to actually read an external DTD subset, or whether it may simply assume
>> what it contains.)
>>
>> The downside is that some non-validating parsers, those that do not read
>> the external subset, will reject the document as not well-formed.
>
> Or they can fail to expand the entities without a fatal error (like Opera
> does). Either way, this is exactly the issue. If I understand Alexey
> correctly, he wants to remove the downside by having a requirement that UAs
> have the mapping for a handful of doctypes.
>
> --
> Simon Pieters
> Opera Software
>
>

But isn't Opera's approach in violation of the XML specification? I
don't consider myself an XML expert, but my understanding is that  an
unparsed entity is a fatal error, and an unrecognized entity is an
unparsed entity.

So, Safari, Chrome, and Firefox would be correct in their handling,
while Opera is not. And the XML specification already provides
documentation as to how these should be handled. We don't need to
restate in the HTML5 specification.

What we need to do with the XHTML5 section of the document is keep the
statement we have: that there's no guarantee that external DTDs are
parsed. The question is, should we go further? HTML5 does not provide
for DTDs, though we are permitted to use "obsolete but conforming"
doctypes. But since there is no DTD for the HTML5 "doctype", the only
named entities that should be available in XHTML are the five
predefined from XML.

Shelley

Received on Tuesday, 3 November 2009 13:10:38 UTC