[whatwg] ' in text/html

[Henri Sivonen]

On Mar 11, 2006, at 02:21, Ian Hickson wrote:

> On Wed, 26 Oct 2005, Simon Pieters wrote:
>>
>> Should "'" be a valid charater reference in text/html? If  
>> not, what
>> would be correct error handling?
>
> I went with making it valid, since it's valid in XML.

That's problematic, because allowing it as a conforming entity  
reference does not add any expressiveness to the language but makes  
conformance checking less useful as an authoring aid (because '  
fails in IE and such failure could be trivially avoided).

I think I'm going to emit a warning even if ' is conforming.

I am uncomfortable with <, >, &, " and © on  
aesthetic grounds, but at least they work interoperably.

By the way, the handling of these entities is currently the only  
special case in my parser that varies depending on the doctype (HTML  
4.01 vs. HTML5).

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen at iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/