[whatwg] External document subset support

[Ian Hickson]

On Fri, 19 Jun 2009, Brett Zamir wrote:
> 
> 1) Firefox and Webkit, should not give a single point of failure for a 
> missing entity as they do now, (unless they switch to a validating 
> parser which finds no declaration in the external file and the user is 
> in validation mode), since such failures in a document with an external 
> DTD are NOT well-formedness errors unless the document deliberately 
> declares standalone=yes.
> 2) Explorer, which no longer seems to require in IE8 that the document 
> be completely described by the DTD as I believe it had earlier (though 
> it will report errors if the document violates rules which are 
> specified), should, per the spec, really only report validation errors 
> upon user option (ideally, I would say, off by default, and activatable 
> on a case-by-case as well as preference-based basis). This will possibly 
> speed things up if the option could be disabled as well as let their 
> browser work with documents which violate validation. But this issue is 
> not as serious as #1, since #1 prevents even valid documents from being 
> interoperably viewed on the web.
> [...]

These issues seem out of scope for HTML5. I recommend bringing them up 
with the respective vendors directly.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'