Re: <META NAME="..." CONTENT="..."> from Paul Prescod on 1997-02-21 (www-html@w3.org from February 1997)

From: Paul Prescod <papresco@calum.csclub.uwaterloo.ca>
Date: Fri, 21 Feb 1997 12:40:00 -0500 (EST)
To: misha.wolf@reuters.com (Misha Wolf)
Cc: www-html@w3.org
Message-Id: <199702211740.MAA11612@calum.csclub.uwaterloo.ca>

> 2. The field containing "Dave Raggett" above.
> 
> HTML 3.2 defines this as CDATA and says:
> 
>    SGML entities in PCDATA content or in CDATA attributes are expanded by 
>    the parser, e.g. &#233; is expanded to the ISO Latin-1 character decimal 
>    233 (a lower case letter e with an acute accent). This could also have 
>    been written as a named character entity, e.g. &eacute;. The & character 
>    can be included in its own right using the named character entity &amp;. 
> 
> ISO 8879-1986 (SGML) appears to say that CDATA, unlike RCDATA, is not 
> allowed to contain entities.  Can anyone shed light on this apparent 
> anomaly, please?

Check out http://www.sil.org/sgml/topics.html#CDATA . 
This document explains that these two uses of CDATA in the SGML standard
are basically unrelated. The HTML 3.2 standard is discussing CDATA attribute
declared value. The section you are reading from the SGML standard is 
discussing element declared content.

 Paul Prescod

Received on Friday, 21 February 1997 12:40:22 UTC