Re: LYNX-DEV hmm. &lt bug?

[Chris Maden]

[Larry Virden]
> As far as I have been able to find out, the & entities just have to
> be delimited in some way to indicate the end of the name.  It could
> be a blank, ;, comma, etc.  However, I think the formal full
> definition calls for a ; to delimit them.

Entity references require a semicolon to end them.  However, since an
entity name can only consist of name characters ([-.a-zA-Z0-9]), any
other character will also end the entity reference.

Netscape's acceptance of &ltfoo as <foo is yet another example of them
taking the easier, quicker path, the one that leads to the Dark Side.
At some point, they'll probably want to support additional entities
from the ISO sets.  Like, say, for example, the left-pointing
triangle, ltri.  Right now[1] &ltri; shows up as <ri; - they'll have
to implement special-casing look-ahead for entities whose names are a
superset of another, or break lots of existing half-baked HTML.

This is just like terminating attribute values with >, which they then
had to break to allow > in alt text; allowing & in attribute values,
which they then had to break to allow entities in attributes...

These problems were all solved more than 11 years ago.  Netscape is to
fscking lazy to do it right the first time, and then they have to
break things later on.

I'd say, "Don't get me started," but it's too late.  Sorry.

-Chris

[1] See <URL:http://www.oreilly.com/people/staff/crism/entities.html>
from Netscape.
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