Re: Semicolon after entities

On Sat, 28 Apr 2007, Lachlan Hunt wrote:

> if Lynx supports entity 
> references that are not defined in HTML4, and not supported by any other 
> browser either, that's a bug in Lynx.

For some odd reason, Lynx displays "∥" as "PP". It's not the only 
browser that recognizes references for entities not defined in HTML 4.

It's not a bug, because there is no mandatory error processing. When a 
browser sees, say, &emdash; or —, it may - as far as HTML 4 
specifications are concerned - apply any error handling it likes, 
including implicit fix to —. We might even argue that this is the 
_best_ error processing strategy in practice, since that's probably what 
the author meant, and if it isn't, we have little odds of achieving 
anything better using some other error handling. (I mildly disagree with 
this argument of mine, but let's not go into this deeper.)

Supporting "proprietary" entities - i.e. something that doesn't consist of 
guessing which of the standard entities was meant - is pragmatically 
different, but not formally.

Besides, ∥ or &emdash; isn't really an error by SGML rules, which is 
what HTML 4 is nominally based on. They are just undefined. :-)

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

Received on Saturday, 28 April 2007 06:49:56 UTC