Re: character references, trailing ';', urls

On Sun, May 04, 2014 at 09:09:48PM +0000, eocene wrote:
> 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.

  Then, it looks like requiring it again in this case may be
the way to go (I seem to recall there were lots of unterminated NBSP).

  A long long time ago people thought that SGML was the final
solution, then XML, then HTML5, now they're looking for an
alternative technology to base the web upon...

-- 
  Cheers
  Jorge.-