Re: XHTML character entity support

On Tue, Nov 3, 2009 at 2:21 PM, Leif Halvard Silli
<xn--mlform-iua@xn--mlform-iua.no> wrote:
> Shelley Powers On 09-11-03 20.39:
>
>> On Tue, Nov 3, 2009 at 12:56 PM, Boris Zbarsky:
>>>
>>> On 11/3/09 1:08 PM, Shelley Powers wrote:
>
>> But, there is a sentence in the existing HTML5 specification
>> that reads:
>>
>> According to the XML specification, XML processors are not
>> guaranteed to process the external DTD subset referenced in the
>> DOCTYPE. This means, for example, that using entity references
>> for characters in XHTML documents is unsafe if they are defined
>> in an external file (except for &lt;, &gt;, &amp;, &quot; and
>> &apos;)
>
>
> It would increase text/html's compatibility with XHTML and vice versa, if
> "these things" were specified, wouldn't it? It would be one obstacle less if
> one wanted to create/serve polyglot documents?
>

No, not all.

Currently, there's no plans, even within this discussion, to allow the
named entities in XHTML5. All the browsers return an error for named
entities other than the five predefined entities.

It is not valid, because there is no DTD for XHTML5. No DTD, no
external entities. Anything else, would result in non-conforming XML
documents.

This discussion seems to be focused more on how browsers respond when
they discover a named entity for a doctype that's not in the blessed
list.

I don't know if this was Alexey's original concern, but that's where
it has evolved.

> However, it might be that the specification of these things does not need to
> go into the HTML 5 specification itself.
>
> Regardless, whenever and wherever it becomes been specified, the quote above
> would need to be updated .
> --
> leif halvard silli
>

Shelley

Received on Tuesday, 3 November 2009 20:56:00 UTC