It's clearer, but so far as I can see not in accord with 8879, and
doesn't say what data characters undefined NCRs should be treated as.
| >If you parse this document
| >
| ><!doctype html system "html.dtd">
| ><title>chars</title>
| ><p>charref: 
| >
| >with sgmls and the HTML sdecl you get in the error stream:
| >
| >sgmls: SGML error at teal.html, line 3 at ";":
| > Numeric character reference exceeds 255; reference ignored
| >
| >and in the output:
| >
| >AVERSION CDATA -//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN
| >ASDAFORM CDATA Book
| >(HTML
| >(HEAD
| >ASDAFORM CDATA Ti
| >(TITLE
| >-chars
| >)TITLE
| >)HEAD
| >(BODY
| >ASDAFORM CDATA Para
| >(P
| >-charref:
| >)P
| >)BODY
| >)HTML
| >
| >
| >Notice that the NCR is not in the output.
|
| Notice also that there is no "C" at the end of the output; i.e. the
| document is not conforming. Ignoring  altogether is one way to
| handle the error. The HTML 2.0 specification suggests another.
which is to ignore ISO 8879 and roll our own. No thanks.
| > There is thus no way
| >to convert it to a text string.
|
| Sure there is: pretend you never recognized characters as markup,
| and just treat them as data characters.
Then write me a free conforming SGML parser that does that!
| > That will have to wait until
| >we agree upon 10646 as the doc charset.
| Huh? what does 10646 have to do with the price of tea in china?
you're tying these undefined NCRs to 10646, right?
| >I repeat my opposition to Dave's proposed language. We spent too
| >much time on this matter to regress in this fashion, and if we
| >specify HTML so that it is not conformant to 8879, we will
| >deserve what we get if people ignore our spec.
|
| It's not that big a deal: we're not going against 8879; it's just
| one more "should" in the interest of consistent error handling,
| which I sensed from the working group is a good thing.
What's consistent about saying we're defining a conforming application
and then say something else. After all,
1.2.1. Documents
A document is a conforming HTML document only if:
* It is a conforming SGML document, and it conforms to
the HTML DTD (see 8.1, "HTML DTD").
| I'll take it out if Mr. Morris will stipulate.
No. Mr Morris is not speaking for the WG on this point, and you had
consensus (if only by silence, but after much discussion) with the
language you had. I'll say it again, you had no business making this
change. I see I now have support from Martin, and I renew my
opposition to this last-minute change.
-- Terry Allen (terry@ora.com) O'Reilly & Associates, Inc. Editor, Digital Media Group 101 Morris St. Sebastopol, Calif., 95472 occasional column at: http://gnn.com/meta/imedia/webworks/allen/A Davenport Group sponsor. For information on the Davenport Group see ftp://ftp.ora.com/pub/davenport/README.html or http://www.ora.com/davenport/README.html