Re: Semicolon after entities

On Wed, 25 Apr 2007, Henri Sivonen wrote:

> 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.

In that case, the difference is in the name of a tool: conformance checker 
or just checker.

> 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

Conformance checkers may issue warnings if they like, as they like, though 
strictly speaking they won't be pure conformance checkers anyway. But 
even the W3C markup validator isn't a pure conformance checker (still less 
a pure validator).

-- 
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

Received on Wednesday, 25 April 2007 09:48:49 UTC