special entities: < > & and "

marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu (Marc Andreessen)

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Date: Wed, 6 Oct 93 14:14:34 -0500
From: marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu (Marc Andreessen)
Message-id: <9310061914.AA16294@wintermute.ncsa.uiuc.edu>
To: kevin@scic.intel.com (Kevin Altis)
Cc: www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch
Subject: special entities: < > & and "
In-reply-to: <9310061708.AA18834@rs042.scic.intel.com>
References: <9310061708.AA18834@rs042.scic.intel.com>
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Kevin Altis writes:
> I seem to remember that you used to have to quote the special characters <
> > & and " within an HTML document so that & becomes &amp, " becomes &quot,
> < and > become &lt and &gt  This is documented in the draft HTML
> specification (actually the &lt and &gt aren't in there), but I've tried it
> out with XMosaic and I don't have to quote the characters at all within
> normal text. If the quoting rule only applies within an URL or as part of a
> tag then it should be documented as such with examples. What's the real
> story Tim?

Don't use Mosaic to *validate* your HTML -- use a DTD and an SGML
parser.  Mosaic handles many error cases cleanly, but they're still
error cases.

Marc