The occurrence of the less than sign "<" or the ampersand "&" as character data in an XHTML document causes the W3C Markup Validator to issue a warning. The document is then reported as valid. For a trivial demo, see http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.cs.tut.fi%2F%7Ejkorpela%2Ftest%2Ftest.xhtml This is incorrect, since such occurrences are errors by XML rules: "The ampersand character (&) and the left angle bracket (<) MUST NOT appear in their literal form, except when used as markup delimiters, or within a comment, a processing instruction, or a CDATA section. If they are needed elsewhere, they MUST be escaped using either numeric character references or the strings "&" and "<" respectively." http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/#syntax Note that even the formal syntax in the XML specification excludes "&" and "<" as data characters: [14] CharData ::= [^<&]* - ([^<&]* ']]>' [^<&]*) This means that the data as a whole cannot match the production for "document", so it does not constitute an XML document at all, i.e. it is not even "well-formed" (ref.: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/#sec-well-formed ). -- Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/Received on Saturday, 3 February 2007 11:22:21 UTC
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