[whatwg] HTML5 doctypes incompatible with XHR if named entities present

[Boris Zbarsky]

On 11/11/09 11:16 PM, Aryeh Gregor wrote:
> I'm pretty sure that XHR is used for screen-scraping beyond Wikipedia,

Since it'd fail any time the data is not well-formed XML, I'd actually 
expect such usage to be rare.  It's not all that common to find "XHTML" 
on the web that happens to be well-formed XML.

>   Could some reasonably minimal, distinctive doctype be invented that
> would avoid the problem but not make the document look to humans and
> validators like it thinks it's some old version of XHTML?

Yes, but browsers would have to add explicit support for it.

> Also, is this a wider problem?  Are there any other tools besides
> browsers that might be magically allowing named entities for some
> doctypes only?

Sure; anything that actually goes and loads the DTD.

-Boris