- From: Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi>
- Date: Sun, 18 May 2003 13:25:08 +0300
- To: www-html@w3.org
On Friday, May 16, 2003, at 23:43 Europe/Helsinki, David Woolley wrote: >> 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. See http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml#wf-entdeclared http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml#vc-entdeclared http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml#include-if-valid > If they did, they polluted the specification with significant details > about an essentially useless feature, named entities. If you think they are useless, would you accept not declaring any character entities in the presumably upcoming XHTML 2 DTD? > 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.), The internal entity names aren't for the application to know. The XML processor deals with expanding internal entity references. And the spec authors even addressed the issue of "Entity Declared" in the spec. > as well as knowing semantic information (e.g. > section and h allowing an XHTL 2 browser to display the document > outline tree). Knowing about the semantics of particular elements is different from having prior knowledge of particular internal entities. Expanding the internal entity references happens at the XML processor level and the XML spec defines how the XML processor finds out about the entity values, but doing something useful with the elements happens at the application level and how the application gets the rules on what to do with particular elements or what the elements mean is outside the scope of the XML spec. -- Henri Sivonen hsivonen@iki.fi http://www.iki.fi/hsivonen/
Received on Sunday, 18 May 2003 06:25:20 UTC