Fwd: XHTML character entity support

See thread starting at  
http://www.w3.org/mid/CB173250-44A4-4E98-B723-101BB5673C85@webkit.org

Maybe this is something that should be specified in the XML spec so that  
there is interoperability between XHTML UAs and other XML UAs.


------- Forwarded message -------
From: "Alexey Proskuryakov" <ap@webkit.org>
To: "HTML WG" <public-html@w3.org>
Cc:
Subject: XHTML character entity support
Date: Sat, 31 Oct 2009 00:10:31 +0100


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 &nbsp; 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.

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).

For obvious performance reasons, it is impractical to ask UAs to
utilize validating XML parsers, so this guarantee may need to be
specified in a way that doesn't require full DTD support.

- WBR, Alexey Proskuryakov


-- 
Simon Pieters
Opera Software

Received on Monday, 2 November 2009 13:58:54 UTC