- From: Ingo Macherius <Ingo.Macherius@tu-clausthal.de>
- Date: Fri, 21 Feb 1997 18:56:29 +0100 (MET)
- To: misha.wolf@reuters.com (Misha Wolf)
- Cc: www-html@w3.org
Meta is defined as
<!ELEMENT META - O EMPTY -- Generic Metainformation -->
<!ATTLIST META
http-equiv NAME #IMPLIED -- HTTP response header name --
name NAME #IMPLIED -- metainformation name --
content CDATA #REQUIRED -- associated information --
>
> <META NAME="Author" CONTENT="Dave Raggett">
> 1. The field containing "Author" above.
> Is this field allowed to contain any characters other than "a" to "z", "A"
> to "Z", "." and "-"? I have been told that HTML 3.2 is less restrictive in
> this area than HTML 2.0. Is this so? Was it so in some earlier draft?
The BNF Form for a NAME attribute is [a-z, A-z][a-z, A-Z, 0-9, -, .]*,
you forget the numbers. The [Goldfarb90], pp. 347.
Why you call this restrictive ? I am happy for any HTML attribute not to
be CDATA, as it eases handling with conforming applications.
> 2. The field containing "Dave Raggett" above.
> 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?
You are right, but tell this to the sloppy Micro$cape people :) After all you
can't really work with the vanilla W3C-HTML3.2-DTD. Quirks like the above
require some editing, e.g. changing this to RCDATA. After all HTML is not
really a SGML language (it only pretends to be). BTW: CDATA may contain
anything, including entities, they are not expanded in this case :)
[Goldfarb90] on pp 342:
"In replaceable character data, all characters are treated as data characters,
except for those necessary to recognize a character or a general entity
reference, as well as the characters that would terminate the replaceable
character data."
Virtually yours,
Ingo
CU,
im
--
Snail : Ingo Macherius // L'Aigler Platz 4 // D-38678 Clausthal-Zellerfeld
Mail : Ingo.Macherius@tu-clausthal.de WWW: http://www.tu-clausthal.de/~inim/
Information!=Knowledge!=Wisdom!=Truth!=Beauty!=Love!=Music==BEST (Frank Zappa)
Received on Friday, 21 February 1997 12:56:33 UTC