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

[Aryeh Gregor]

On Wed, Nov 11, 2009 at 11:39 PM, Boris Zbarsky <bzbarsky at mit.edu> wrote:
> 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.

A number of popular web apps output mostly well-formed XML, as far as
I know: vBulletin, WordPress, etc.  Not even close to most websites,
of course, but a significant number, I'd think.  Of course, they
probably don't have the same kind of script-writing community that
Wikipedia does -- that's very peculiar to Wikipedia.

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

That mostly defeats the point -- they could equally add explicit
support for non-XML responseXML first.  This should be a short- to
medium-term problem only.

This makes it sound like if Wikipedia switches to HTML5 and isn't
willing to break all screen-scrapers on principle, we'll have to use
an obsolete but conforming doctype.  That's kind of a pain,
particularly from an evangelism point of view.  Especially if it
raises validator warnings.  But I guess that's where XML has gotten
us.