On 5 Jun 2009, at 00:49, Ian Hickson wrote:
Could you give an example of what you mean? I'm having trouble
following
your description
On Fri, 24 Apr 2009, Øistein E. Andersen wrote:
Let &IE4 (resp. &HTML4, &HTML5) be a non-semicolon-terminated named
character reference from the IE4 (resp. HTML4, HTML5) set,
&IE4 includes é, ï
&HTML4 includes in addition &pi, œ and
&HTML5 includes in addition &SHcy, &rcaron.
and let .
(full stop) represent any character other than semicolon, and ^
(circumflex) any character which is (roughly) not an ASCII letter or
digit (i.e., [^a-zA-Z0-9]). Not completely unreasonable sets of
character references to expand (outside of attribute values) include:
1) &IE4^
e.g., café (café)
2) &IE4.
e.g., naïve (naïve)
3) &HTML4^
e.g., 2&pi (2π)
4) &IE4. &HTML4^
e.g., naïve (naïve), 2&pi (2π)
5) &HTML4.
e.g., hors d'&oeliguvre (hors d'œuvre)
6) &IE4. &HTML5^
e.g., naïve (naïve), &SHcy(A/K) [Ш(A/K)]
7) &HTML4. &HTML5^
e.g., hors d'&oeliguvre (hors d'œuvre), &SHcy(A/K)
[Ш(A/K)]
8) &HTML5.
e.g., Dvo&rcaronák (Dvořák)
[...]
Currently, Opera follows 1),
i.e., expands café, but not naïve or 2&pi
IE 2),
i.e., expands café and naïve, but not &2pi
and Safari and Firefox 3).
i.e., expands café and 2&pi, but not naïve
My main concern is that &HTML4^ is actually legitimate in HTML4 and
works in both Safari and Firefox today, and that HTML5 should not
change
the rendering of valid HTML4 pages unless there is a good reason to
do
so.
Non-semicolon-terminated entities that were conforming in HTML4, like
&pi and &mdash when they are not followed by a letter or digit
(roughly speaking), are currently expanded in Safari and Firefox, and
requiring this to change would be a regression affecting existing pages.
As far as I can tell HTML5 more or less matches what legacy pages
need,
You keep repeating this, and also that much work has been done to get
entity parsing right and that you really do not want to change it. It
seems to me that you have tried to follow IE's behaviour closely,
which is not completely unreasonable. I have not seen evidence of any
analysis of legacy pages supporting this decision, though; on the
contrary, more or less anecdotal evidence sent to the mailing list(s)
seems to suggest that certain modifications might make the algorithm
work better for legacy pages. Replicating IE may well be good enough
and seems like a reasonably safe option, but HTML5 does not completely
follow IE in other areas, and I do not quite see why entity parsing
should be treated differently.
--
Øistein E. Andersen