Re: C.4 Undeclared entities?

At 1:20 PM 10/17/96, Michael Sperberg-McQueen wrote:
>On 23 October 1996, the ERB will vote to decide the following
>question.  A straw poll indicates the ERB is leaning to declaring
>only lt, gt, and amp automatically and making references to
>undeclared entities be a reportable error.
>
>C.4 if XML makes DTDs optional and allows partial DTDs, what must or
>may a parser do when it encounters references to undeclared entities
>(9.4)?  Should XML declare any set of entities automatically?

All the ISO Latin-1 entities should be declared, as should any of the
entities curently in HTML (even ones we think are stupid, if there are any
such).

People think this is a part of SGML anyway, and the names are well known.
Compatibility with the general public's expectations dictates this answer.
People _like_ namespace pollution when it meets their expectations
(otherwise why would people like PERL?). This is a case where the anti-CS
viewpoint should win out.

What does reportable error mean for netscape? I think that, at the least,
we should suggest non-bindingly that display applications treat undefined
entities as "broken text" -- similarly to the current broken image strategy
(which could also be viewed as a reportable error).

  -- David

RE delenda est.

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Received on Thursday, 17 October 1996 22:48:57 UTC