Re: character references, trailing ';', urls

I wrote:
> Jorge wrote:
> >   AFAIR the original routine was written to require the trailing ';'
> > and it worked well for some time. Then more pages started to show
> > unterminated entities inside, and it got so annoying we decided to
> > make it more flexible and not to require the ';' when the entity
> > name was found (IIRC).
> 
> Yeah, this is why I was considering just changing the get_attr case,
> but of course I don't want to make the code messy and complicated
> unless I need to.
>  
> >   It'd be good to find the reason for the change before reverting it.
> > I don't remember it now, but I do remember it was because the other way
> > started to be perceived as worst in some sense.
> > 
> >   Maybe GMANE has the mailing list archives...
> 
> I guess I'll put some time into digging around.

http://lists.dillo.org/pipermail/dillo-dev/2005-January/002502.html

where we get the end of a conversation between Jorge and Matthias Franz.

This msg says that it was changed because it wasn't required under
certain conditions. HTML4 spec gives it as:

  Note. In SGML, it is possible to eliminate the final ";" after a
  character reference in some cases (e.g., at a line break or
  immediately before a tag). In other circumstances it may not be
  eliminated (e.g., in the middle of a word). We strongly suggest
  using the ";" in all cases to avoid problems with user agents that
  require this character to be present.


...and there's an "IIRC" in the msg that XHTML requires it.

The HTML5 spec requires a terminating ';' in all cases.