[whatwg] [html5] tags, elements and generated DOM

[Henri Sivonen]

On Feb 25, 2006, at 01:06, Ian Hickson wrote:

> On Thu, 7 Apr 2005, Henri Sivonen wrote:
>>
>> I am very hostile towards the idea of requiring UAs to implement  
>> any XML
>> parsing features that are in the realm of the XML 1.0 spec but  
>> that the
>> XML 1.0 spec does not require. This means processing the DTD beyond
>> checking the internal subset for well-formedness.
>>
>> I would rather suggest that What WG specs explicitly discourage  
>> people
>> from using a doctype on the XHTML side and point out that authors  
>> should
>> not expect UAs to process the DTD.
>>
>> Those who want to use entities for input, should parse and  
>> reserialize
>> as UTF-8 in their own lair and not expose their entity references (or
>> parochial legacy encodings) to the public network.
>
> The spec has text to this effect in places now; let me know if you  
> have
> more specific text you'd like to see. I don't want to be too  
> strong, since
> if you're using XML, exactly how you do so is the problem of the  
> XML spec,
> not the Web Apps / XHTML5 spec.

At the end of section 1.8 it says:
"These XML documents may contain a DOCTYPE if desired, but this is  
not required to conform to this specification."

I'd like to see a note here. Something like this:
Note: According to [XML], XML processors are not guaranteed to  
process the external DTD subset referenced in the DOCTYPE. This  
means, for example, that using entities for characters is unsafe  
(except for <, >, &, " and '). For  
interoperability, authors are advised to avoid optional features of XML.

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