Re: On ampersands.

Ahhh!! Okay - I feel better now.  I did not realize this difference
existed.

So, for forward looking documents, authors should escape all ampersands
and terminate all general entity references with semi-colons.  That way
their documents will migrate to XHTML and friends that much more easily.

Masayasu Ishikawa wrote:
> 
> "Shane P. McCarron" <shane@aptest.com> wrote:
> 
> > "Shane P. McCarron" wrote:
> > >
> > > Gerald Oskoboiny wrote:
> > > > There are some cases where the ampersands don't need to be
> > > > escaped, like: <p>foo & bar</p>, or <a href="foo&_bar">
> > > >
> > >
> > > I don't think I agree.  In SGML, an ampersand always introduces an
> > > entity reference.  If you want to actually use an ampersand, you are
> > > required to use &amp;. I don't see any way around this requirement.
> >
> > Okay...  The XML specification is pretty clear on this, and is available
> > on-line at http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml
> 
> Well, you're right in terms of XML, but you're wrong in terms of SGML.
> This is where SGML and XML differ.
> 
> "Comparison of SGML and XML" [SGML-XML] says:
> 
>    XML imposes the following restrictions not in SGML:
> 
>      * Entity references
>           + Entity references must be closed with a REFC delimiter
>                 (snip)
>      * Character references
>           + Character references must be closed with a REFC delimiter
>                 (snip)
>      * Other
>                 (snip)
>           + When < and & occur as data, they must be entered as &lt; and
>             &amp;
> 
> [SGML-XML] http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-sgml-xml
> 
> Regards,
> --
> Masayasu Ishikawa / mimasa@w3.org
> W3C - World Wide Web Consortium

--
Shane P. McCarron                  phone: +1 763 786-8160
ApTest                               fax: +1 763 786-8180
                                  mobile: +1 612 799-6942
                                  e-mail: shane@aptest.com

Received on Thursday, 6 July 2000 14:03:04 UTC