- From: Alexey Proskuryakov <ap@webkit.org>
- Date: Sat, 31 Oct 2009 13:24:51 -0700
- To: Shelley Powers <shelley.just@gmail.com>
- Cc: HTML WG <public-html@w3.org>
31.10.2009, в 11:29, Shelley Powers написал(а): >> As noted in >> <http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#writing-xhtml-documents >> >, >> there is no guarantee that authors can use character entity >> references such >> as in XHTML, because XML parsers are not required to process >> external >> DTD subsets. This works in at least Firefox, Safari and Opera, but >> it's >> depressing that such a major feature is not interoperable per the >> spec. >> > > Actually it is interoperable -- there is no guarantee that an XML > parser will process an external DTD. What kind of change do you want > to make it interoperable? I do not understand your comment. "No guarantee" is a synonym to "not interoperable", isn't it? Authors have long been using and friends in XHTML, and no browser engine can practically ship without support for such (as long it supports XHTML at all, of course). To me, this means that this requirement needs to be present in HTML5 - a spec that says an engine is not required to support these entities would be misleading and unhelpful. >> I think that it's important to guarantee that character entity >> references >> work in XHTML (even when parsing fragments, e.g. with innerHTML - >> which >> doesn't currently work in Firefox or Safari, and is confusing to >> authors). >> > > True, named entities don't work with innerHTML with Firefox, Safari, > and Chrome. But numeric references do work, regardless of DTD. One can > use £ instead of £ with consistent results regardless of > browser, XHTML or HTML, and DTD. I know that authors get confused by this limitation of innerHTML - and I do not think it's necessary from any point of view. It would be trivial to fix in WebKit, for instance, and that wouldn't violate any spec besides the current draft of HTML5. > Can we do what you ask and ensure the document will still parse as > XML, without errors? I doubt that there is a beautiful way to do so. Since I'm basically asking to decouple XHTML named entity support from validation, no matter what we do would likely go against the spirit of original XML specs. There are non-beautiful solutions - for example, a UA can recognize XHTML DTDs by name, and enable named entity support without fetching and parsing that DTD. On the other hand, I'm not sure that compatibility with non-UA XML parsers should be maintained at all costs. There is precedent for Web content that claims being XML without strictly being such - RSS feeds - and the sky hasn't fallen. - WBR, Alexey Proskuryakov
Received on Saturday, 31 October 2009 20:25:27 UTC