Re: ISO character entitties (was Re: Web Magazine featuring Accessibility issues)

[In reply to Gregory Rosmaita]
Short answer: always use a semicolon.  It's always right and never wrong.
What you tell your students is useful, and I don't see a need to modify it.

But what I was saying to Leonard is that, per ISO 8879 (SGML), an entity
reference can be ended with a semicolon or record end (RE, SGML's way of
referring to the end of a line).  However, if neither is present, the
parser will accept all of the name characters after the ampersand, and stop
when it comes to something that isn't a name character.  Name characters
are letters, numbers, the hyphen and the period.  In your example, AT&ampT,
the name characters following the ampersand are a-m-p-T, so there is a
reference to the undefined entity "ampT".  Many browsers incorrectly
interpret this; Lynx is not among them.  But in a URL with ampersands,
you're more likely to run into a non-name character such as = or " than you
are to run into a semicolon or end of line.  Entity recognition will
(properly) stop with those characters.

-Chris

--
Christopher R. Maden, Solutions Architect
Exemplary Technologies
One Embarcadero Center, Ste. 2405
San Francisco, CA 94111

Received on Thursday, 21 October 1999 15:47:16 UTC