Re: XHTML character entity support

On 11/3/09 2:39 PM, Shelley Powers wrote:
> According to the XML specification, XML processors are not guaranteed
> to process the external DTD subset referenced in the DOCTYPE. This
> means, for example, that using entity references for characters in
> XHTML documents is unsafe if they are defined in an external file
> (except for<,>,&," and')
>
> That is all a web author needs to know.

That's fine with me.  It's not all an XHTML processor needs to know to 
be compatible with XHTML-as-she-is-spoke.

>> In the area of "html" (whatever that might mean), this does in fact seem
>> like the job of this working group, fundamentally.
>
> No, the charter for this group is to provide a DOM, an evolution of
> HTML4, an XML serialization, some APIs, and some wizzy gee wiz
> graphical "stuff".

If we're going to charter-lawyer, the charter says (in the Scope section):

   This group will maintain and produce incremental revisions
   to the HTML specification, which includes the series of
   specifications previously published as XHTML version 1.

Of course there's nothing in the Deliverables section directly 
addressing this part of the scope...

So we're not _required_ to define this, but defining it is certainly 
within our scope, if my charter-lawyering is not off.

> I think it's a mistake to include the areas already included in the
> document whose sole purpose seems to be to normalize browser behavior.

And I think those are the most important parts of the document and a 
higher priority than pretty much anything else this group is doing. 
Probably something to do with us having slightly different backgrounds 
here.  ;)

> For certain doctypes, the browsers support the entities via catalog.
> This is consistent with validating parsers.

Yes.

My concern is that if someone decides to write a new browser tomorrow 
they should be able to do so by reading the spec and implementing, 
without having to reverse-engineer existing browsers.  I realize you 
don't care about this, presumably because you're happy with the browser 
competitive landscape, past and present.   I'm not happy with the past, 
and I'm only marginally more happy with the present.  I do want to make 
sure we do NOT ever go back to the competitive landscape of the past for 
browsers.  That involves it being as easy as possible to create a browser.

> For XHTML5, which has no DTD, the behavior is consistent: only the
> five predefined entities are available, anything else is an error. And
> from I can see, the behavior with this is consistent.

Sure.  I'm not worrying about the no-DTD case here.

-Boris

Received on Tuesday, 3 November 2009 20:06:14 UTC