Re: A note to implementors about entities in external instance data

On Fri, 27 Oct 2006 16:46:53 +0200, Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi> wrote:

> Doing something special with entities based on namespace is not right.  
> AFAIK, Gecko does no such thing. (The entity hack is keyed on public id.)

Fine.

> I agree that declaring them non-well-formed is wrong.

Good, so we agree.

> (However, in the case of Gecko, it is not a bug in expat but a  
> consequence of how expat is driven.) Still, the *application* is free to  
> refuse to deal with documents that have unresolved entities.

Right. But it has to get them in order to be able to decide :-)

> That might not be a good idea for browsers

It wouldn't, because all HTML and XHTML specs say how they should react to  
undefined entities.

> but using entities (other than the 5 predefined ones) on the Web is a  
> bad idea, too.

I know people who subscribe to that view, and I know people who don't  
subscribe to that view.
Here's what I understand from the two sides of the argument (tell me if  
I've missed any):

	A) Just use the Unicode character
	B) It's not on my keyboard
	   If I paste the unicode character from somewhere it shows up wrongly in  
the browser, and then I have to go off and work out how to tell my  
provider's server to serve this document as UTF-8 rather than Latin-1
	   I can remember &euro; better than &#9876; or whatever it is, which I  
have to look up every time I use it
	   &euro; works whatever the encoding.

Steven

Received on Friday, 27 October 2006 15:39:29 UTC