- From: Leif Halvard Silli <xn--mlform-iua@xn--mlform-iua.no>
- Date: Wed, 10 Feb 2010 14:24:30 +0100
- To: John Cowan <cowan@ccil.org>
- Cc: Richard Ishida <ishida@w3.org>, www-international@w3.org
John Cowan, Wed, 10 Feb 2010 02:38:50 -0500: > Leif Halvard Silli scripsit: > >> (1) It should be mentioned that in SGML based mark-up, such as HTML4, >> one may omit the ";" in NCRs. All the big 6 (IE, Firefox, Opera, >> Webkit, Konqueror, Chrome [assuming it is like Webkit]) desktop >> browsers supports this _inside attributes_. (I have a quite thorough >> test document here: <http://målform.no/ncr-test/> ) They also all >> support it for text, except that IE has an exception when it comes to >> NCRs directly in text: Then, for hex NCRs, IE requires semicolons, >> while for decimal NCRs it does not require it. [IE got support for hex >> NCRs later on, didn't it? Must be a bug ... !] So one could give the >> usage advice that is "better" and simpler to use the semicolon than to >> avoid it. But still tell that it is permitted to drop it. (My view is >> that it should be permitted in HTML5 too.) Another part of the advice >> could be that it is safer - and more justified - to use inside machine >> readable attributes than inside human readable text. > > On the contrary, I would not document that you can drop it, particularly > when you can't always. Everyone talks talks the semicolon. But no one talks about the issue that really matters: The length of the escape string. I know that it can't always be dropped - wasn't that clear? My advice is to limit its use to attributes - where one also might have a particular reason for wanting to be incompatible with some user agent - the adventure of targeting particular browsers - in order to save oneself from /other/ bugs. Either that, or one could say that one should limit this use to decimal NCRs - then one is 100% covered w.r.t. IE (because I don't know if we can count in such things as Lobo). You just said that named entities doesn't work in a compatible way i XHTML. So, at least XHTML cannot be a reason to not document that dropping semicolon is compatible with HTML4. All UAs - except at least perhaps new ones (like the Lobo browser, which started in 2005 - "with the aim to fully support HTML 4,") - seem to have support for dropping the ";". I can tell you that I was very puzzled to find out that there is such wide support for dropping the ";", given the many advices to not drop it. -- leif halvard silli
Received on Wednesday, 10 February 2010 13:25:10 UTC