Re: XHTML character entity support

> Using something that doesn't name an old version of MathML gets you
> the YSoD in shipped Gecko 

well if your document is targetting shipped gecko then you will restrict to
mathml2 (and only some parts of html5) anyway so using a mathml2 doctype
would be pretty reasonable. But (whatever Mozilla's actual plans, which
aren't directly relevant to the spec) the spec should be written
assuming that rendering engines will appear sometime in the future that
implement html5 and mathml3.

If a document is using a new mathml3 feature such as dir="rtl" for Arabic
layout then it isn't going to work in currently shipped products
whatever doctype you put at the top. Saying that documents using those
features use a mathml2 doctype is forcing weirdness on the entire future
just to cope with a temporary problem in the transition.


> It doesn't make the document invalid if you use a non-legacy
> validation mechanism and turn off DTD validation. (To pre-empt
> concerns like this, Validator.nu doesn't let you enable DTD validation
> even as an option.) 

Saying that it's OK to make the XML usage fragile and weird because
people can use non xml tools doesn't really address the problem.
The majority of people are clearly going to use the html serialisation,
people who choose to use the xml serialisation presumably do it for a
reason, and compatiblity with dtd validating xml tools is one perfectly
good reason.


> If the conclusion is to mint a new entity-enabling public id instead of
> using the one that is backwards-compatible with shipped Gecko, then
> definitely the public id should be something like the above and not
> suggest anything about a particular HTML or MathML spec level/version to
> avoid the perceived need to mint yet another public id in the future.

Agreed there, which is why we forked the whole entities stuff out of the
mathml spec, but my suggestion would be to arrange the effective entity
resolver such that the end user never really needs to know this id at
all and (in a browser-like context for application/xhtml+xml) always
unconditionally act as if this doctype had  been used rather than
manintaining a special list of doctype id that trigger this. If you
freeze a special list then (as noted above) it becomes more and more
disconected from reality as languages are revised, or the browser has to
keep making the list longer, neither of which is ideal.

David

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Received on Wednesday, 11 November 2009 14:05:59 UTC