Re: Semicolon after entities

> I would re-cast this along the lines of the following :
>
>        8.1.1. The DOCTYPE
>
>        A DOCTYPE is a much abused, but required, header.
> Although browsers have quirks/standards mode, that is based upon the
> DOCTYPE used, if any, not the version of the langague.
Doesn't the choice of which DOCTYPE to use depend on the version of
HTML you're using? For example, it's probably not a good idea to use
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2 Final//EN"> on an HTML 4
page (or vice versa).

>        Until the introduction of HTML5, DOCTYPEs have -- in the
>        main -- been mere eye-candy at the start of a putative
>        HTML document.  With the introduction of HTML5, the
>        DOCTYPE plays a vital role in determining the processing
>        model for HTML documents.  If a well-formed HTML5 DOCTYPE
>        is found (in the syntactically correct position), a
>        conforming browser is REQUIRED to adopt the strict processing
>        model described elsewhere in this specification.  If such
>        a DOCTYPE is NOT found (or is found but in a position where
>        its semantics are undefined), then a conforming browser is
>        entitled to adopt any processing model that it deems fit.

Well said. Of course, we can all expect IE to ignore that... :-)

So anyway, I was just wondering, is HTML 5 going to require ; on the
end of entities? (is it decided yet?)

Received on Friday, 27 April 2007 21:49:21 UTC