Re: Parsing < and <

Peter Flynn (pflynn@curia.ucc.ie)
Fri, 21 Apr 95 01:31:21 EDT

Please tell me which part of the spec states the _exact_ difference between
named reference and numeric reference. Section 13. of the current spec
(http://www.ics.uci.edu/pub/ietf/html/draft-ietf-html-spec-03.txt)
Character Entity Sets, esp. 13.1 Numeric and Special Graphic Entity Set is
not clear for this question...

Since HTML is an application of SGML, many of the rules and
distinctions are assumed to carry over. Goldfarb, _The SGML Handbook_,
pp 451-452 says "...a numeric character reference should not be used
in the document instance if an entity reference can be substituted."

My question has nothing to do with the HTML DTD (grep the DTD you'll find
no < or <).

You do in my copy...

<!--================ Character mnemonic entities ==========================-->

<!ENTITY % ISOlat1 system "/tlh/html/ISOlat1" --PUBLIC
"ISO 8879-1986//ENTITIES Added Latin 1//EN//HTML"-->
%ISOlat1;

<!ENTITY amp CDATA "&#38;" -- ampersand -->
<!ENTITY gt CDATA "&#62;" -- greater than -->
<!ENTITY lt CDATA "&#60;" -- less than -->
<!ENTITY quot CDATA "&#34;" -- double quote -->

///Peter