Re: Semicolon after entities

On Apr 25, 2007, at 08:28, Jukka K. Korpela wrote:

> If you first specify a requirement on documents (always use ";")  
> and then specify mandatory error processing related to it (browsers  
> must recognize entity references without ";"), then you have  
> effectively defined the error as a feature, though a deprecated  
> one. But you can proclaim that you have now defined a stricter  
> version of the language. :-)

The difference is when a conformance checker alerts an author about  
an error. Since the omission of the semicolon is potentially  
confusing, it makes sense to make the omission non-conforming so that  
conformance checkers alert authors who have omitted the semicolon  
inadvertently (e.g. by pasting a URL that contains a query string  
part that looks like an entity reference). This way, unintentional  
omissions are caught. After all, deliberate omissions are probably  
only done by a small group of language lawyers.

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen@iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/

Received on Wednesday, 25 April 2007 06:17:57 UTC