- From: David Carlisle <davidc@nag.co.uk>
- Date: Thu, 17 Jan 2013 15:33:40 +0000
- To: WHATWG <whatwg@whatwg.org>
This is a further attempt to resolve the bug report (currently with status wontfix) regarding XHTML entity definitions. (whatwg) https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=17798 (w3c) https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=13409 By adding "-//W3C//ENTITIES HTML MathML Set//EN//XML" To the list in 13.2 Parsing XHTML documents Of Identifiers that are recognised when parsing XHTML syntax documents. The current list gives no way to specify the identifier of a compatible set of entity definitions so makes it highly likely that documents will be interpreted differently by an XHTML user agent and a standard XML toolchain. This is bad considering that being able to use xml tools on the document is about the only reason for wanting to serve the document as xhtml rather than text/html. Further rationale is given in a message on the w3c list here: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html-admin/2013Jan/0021.html But I wanted to flag it here as well as this list presumably reaches a different audience. In particular a question for implementers, would adding "-//W3C//ENTITIES HTML MathML Set//EN//XML" to the list of recognised doctype PUBLIC identifiers be impossibly hard, trivially easy, or inconvenient but you'd do it if the spec changed? Ian said in the original bug (comment 11) > I'm happy to add new DTDs to the list; all you have to do is show that > the URL you want to add already works in the majority of deployed > browsers. To do that, please simply provide trivial test cases that > use the DTD you want to have supported. It's not clear to me from this > bug so far what exactly it is you want changed in the spec. However "already works" is a rather impossible criterion for fixing this problem. There were previously doctype declarations that worked (as witnessed by the XHTML version of the MathML2 spec) but current browsers have converged on the list as specified in HTML so implementations have followed the spec which means it is now not possible to use entities in XHTML if you specify a DTD that defines them, but is if you specify a DTD that does not. Adding one extra recognised PUBLIC identifier gives a way that documents may be produced that work on pre-html5 browsers and browsers updated to recognise the additional string and also work with standard xml tools. http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/the-xhtml-syntax.html#parsing-xhtml-documents David ________________________________________________________________________ The Numerical Algorithms Group Ltd is a company registered in England and Wales with company number 1249803. The registered office is: Wilkinson House, Jordan Hill Road, Oxford OX2 8DR, United Kingdom. This e-mail has been scanned for all viruses by Star. The service is powered by MessageLabs. ________________________________________________________________________
Received on Thursday, 17 January 2013 15:34:38 UTC