- From: Řistein E. Andersen <html5@xn--istein-9xa.com>
- Date: Sun, 05 Nov 2006 15:52:18 +0100
>From section 9.2.3.1. Tokenising entities: > For some entities, UAs require a semicolon, for others they don't. This applies to IE. FWIW, the entities not requiring a semicolon are the ones encoding Latin-1 characters, the other HTML 3.2 entities (&, > and <), as well as " and the uppercase variants (&, ©, >, <, " and ®). IE/mac has its very own interpretation of what `requiring a semicolon' means; it treats &Deltax as &Deltax, but &Deltax; as Δx; (with the final semicolon rendered). Firefox and Safari, on the other hand, seem to have implemented the SGML notion of entities (mostly) correctly, not requiring a semicolon before whitespace, tags, etc. (the definition of `etc.' varies slightly) and not giving preferential treatment to certain entities. Opera apparently allows omission of a semicolon only when both IE and Firefox/Safari do. This means that `à la' is rendered as intended in all (these) browsers, whereas `naïve' is not (IE only); `Haÿ les Roses' works fine, but not the hyphenated `Haÿ-les-Roses' (not Firefox) or the capitalised `HA&Yuml LES ROSES' (Firefox/Safari only). Making omission of semicolons conforming (in specific cases) does therefore not seem very compelling, as it would either be confusing and apparently arbitrary or make conforming documents render inconsistently. (Parsing still has to be defined, of course, but bear in mind that constructions like `naïve' are IE-only.) -- ??istein E. Andersen
Received on Sunday, 5 November 2006 06:52:18 UTC