Re: Fwd: XHTML character entity support

Shelley Powers wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 3, 2009 at 3:28 AM, Simon Pieters <simonp@opera.com> wrote:
>> On Mon, 02 Nov 2009 20:41:24 +0100, John Cowan <cowan@ccil.org> wrote:
>>
>>> Simon Pieters scripsit:
>>>
>>>> What is being discussed is not adding predefined entities. What is being
>>>> discussed is making certain doctypes map to DTDs that contain just entity
>>>> declarations (which is what Firefox, WebKit and Opera do today).
>>> Well, any non-validating parser is free to do that today.  (It's not quite
>>> clear to me from the XML Rec whether a validating parser is compelled
>>> to actually read an external DTD subset, or whether it may simply assume
>>> what it contains.)
>>>
>>> The downside is that some non-validating parsers, those that do not read
>>> the external subset, will reject the document as not well-formed.
>> Or they can fail to expand the entities without a fatal error (like Opera
>> does). Either way, this is exactly the issue. If I understand Alexey
>> correctly, he wants to remove the downside by having a requirement that UAs
>> have the mapping for a handful of doctypes.
>>
>> --
>> Simon Pieters
>> Opera Software
>>
>>
> But isn't Opera's approach in violation of the XML specification? I
> don't consider myself an XML expert, but my understanding is that  an
> unparsed entity is a fatal error, and an unrecognized entity is an
> unparsed entity.

It's only a fatal error if you are a validating parser. You're free to
do as you please with the error you get with a non-validating parser
and there are external entities in the document.

-- 
Geoffrey Sneddon — Opera Software
<http://gsnedders.com/>
<http://www.opera.com/>

Received on Tuesday, 3 November 2009 14:06:31 UTC