- From: David Woolley <david@djwhome.demon.co.uk>
- Date: Fri, 16 May 2003 21:43:48 +0100 (BST)
- To: www-html@w3.org
> Not supporting character entities in XHTML is not a bug in Opera if > 1) XHTML is an application of XML > and > 2) XHTML user agents aren't required to use validating XML processors. I can't believe that the designers of XML intended this interpretation. If they did, they polluted the specification with significant details about an essentially useless feature, named entities. If protecting the reserved characters was their only purpose, it would have been simpler to simply state that the numeric references should be used. I think it much more likely that the intention was that tools for particular applications should know the entities referenced from the official DTD (etc.), as well as knowing semantic information (e.g. section and h allowing an XHTL 2 browser to display the document outline tree). I think they were trying to avoid a tool having to read user provided customisations to the schema, and allowing the creation of general XML tools that didn't understand any semantics, and therefore could do relatively little other than show and edit the raw structure or display according to a provided style sheet.
Received on Friday, 16 May 2003 16:49:46 UTC