Re: Netscape 6 support for XML

"Martin Honnen" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
>
>
> EU citizen wrote:
>
> > Netscape 6 is supposed to support XML. However it doesn' t display acute
> > accented vowels (see
> >
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/r.a.mccartney/test/test_file_for_iso-8859-1.xml).
> > Have I made some sort of mistake, or is support for XML  more patchy
than is
> > generally indicated?
>
> Looking at the source of that file I find stuff like &aacute; which is a
> character reference making sense in HTML and XHTML but certainly not in
> XML in general. So an XML parser doesn't know what &aacute; stands for
> unless the DTD defines it and the parser reads the DTD but a
> non-validating XML parser like expat which Mozilla (and Netscape 6/7)
> use is not required to read external DTDs and usually doesn't do it.
> So what you have there is something special, it is XML of course, but
> with elements in the XHTML namespace and with an external DTD referenced
> that defines those entities referenced in the document. So the problem
> for browser producers like Mozilla/Netscape as well as for Opera making
> use of an XML parser like expat is to somehow ensure some entities
> predefined are known in XHTML even if external DTDs are not loaded. I
> know some earlier Opera 7 therefore had problems displaying characters
> created by entity references defined in the XHTML DTDs and from what you
> say Netscape 6 also has the problem.

Thanks for your insights. This does make me doubt the extent to which XHTML
served as XML is suopported by older browsers. According to W3C, one of the
main advantages of  XHTML over HTML is that it allows you to define your own
entities. If external DTDs are not loaded by some User Agents, then it is
obviously going to be more difficult to do this.

>
> If you want to use some character in XML and want to make sure an XML
> parser understand it then use UTF-8 or UTF-16 as the encoding as that
> allows you to simply use all characters (well all characters the Unicode
> standards knows and XML allows) directly without the need for character
> references and as XML parsers are only required to support those two
> encodings. Hopefully with such a document Netscape 6 will you then show
> you "á" in the document correctly but I haven't tested.
>


I tried entering the acute-accented vowels using Notepad. Unfortunately
these are displayed as question marks in Netscape 6.2 (but if you use IE6 to
look at the source you cansee the accented vowels). See
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/r.a.mccartney/test/test_file_for_utf-8_accents_without_entities.xml

I wouldn't use Netscape 6.2 for surfing the net myself, I only used it to
test support for XHTML.