[whatwg] Entity parsing

[Michel Fortin]

Le 2007-06-14 à 21:05, Ian Hickson a écrit :

> I've defined the parsing and conformance requirements in a way that  
> matches IE. As a side-effect, this has made things like "na&iumlve"  
> actually conforming. I don't know if we want this.

I'd make it non-conforming for the sake of readability.

> On the one hand, it's pragmatic (after all, why require the  
> semicolon?), and is equivalent to not requiring quotes around  
> attribute values. On the other, people don't want us to make the  
> quotes optional either.

I'm perfectly fine with quotes being optional; I think unquoted  
attribute values are generally as easy to read as their quoted  
counterparts, if not sometime easier since you don't have the noise  
of the quotes.

On the other hand, it took me about a minute to figure out the word  
in your example -- "na&iumlve" -- simply because I couldn't find  
where to put the delimitation between the end of the entity name and  
the last few characters in the word. In other words, is this the  
entity &iu, &ium, &iuml, &iumlv or &iumlve ? Without a list of  
entities at hand, it takes a lot of guesswork to find the length it  
consume and the name of the entity. And not everyone can remember all  
those entity names.


Michel Fortin
michel.fortin at michelf.com
http://www.michelf.com/