When did IE stop recognizing entity references without ";"?

Posted by Jukka K. Korpela on October 11, 2005, 10:51 am

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I noticed that Internet Explorer (6.0, on Win XP SP 2, all fixes
installed) incorrectly renders e.g.
&harr &euro &Omega
literally and not as characters denoted by the entities, but if a
semicolon is appended to each of the entity references, they work.

I'm pretty sure that previous versions of IE rendered them by the
specifications. I first thought this has something to do with XML (i.e.
maybe IE pretends to play a little bit of XML game when processing HTML,
even when I serve it as text/html and use an HTML 4.01 DOCTYPE). But on
closer look, I notice that
&auml &eacute
work correctly.

It seems that ISO Latin 1 entities work without a semicolon, newer
entities don't. Am I mistaken, i.e. was this always the case on IE?

(Of course, it has always been recommendable to use the terminating
semicolon in entity references, but it is not required by SGML, hence by
classic HTML rules, when the reference is followed by a character that
is not a name character, e.g. by a space. There must be _lots_ of legacy
documents that play fast with entity references without semicolons.)

Posted by Leif K-Brooks on October 11, 2005, 8:00 am

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Jukka K. Korpela wrote:
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Internet Explorer 5.5 seems to behave the same way.

Posted by Els on October 11, 2005, 10:07 am

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Leif K-Brooks wrote:

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Mine too, as does my IE4.0. But I reckon it maybe due to those being
installed on WinXP with SP2. For a real test, you should look at an
installation on Win98 or Win95 I think.

--
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Posted by David Ross on October 11, 2005, 6:41 pm

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"Jukka K. Korpela" wrote:
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Section 5.3 of the HTML 4.01 specification says:
"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."

Thus, the absence of a semi-colon is not necessarily wrong even if
it is contrary to a strong suggestion to always have the
semi-colon.

--

David E. Ross
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I use Mozilla as my Web browser because I want a browser that
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Posted by Lachlan Hunt on October 16, 2005, 1:13 am

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Jukka K. Korpela wrote:
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Support in IE actually looks a little worse than that. It is, indeed,
as you mentioned, IE only supports ISO-8859-1 entity references without
the semi-colon, plus &amp, &lt, &gt and &quot from the markup
significant category. All others are only supported with the semi-colon.

However, it also fails to support any hex character reference without
the semi-colon, but does support numeric (decimal) character references
just fine with or without.

See the tests:
http://lachy.id.au/dev/markup/tests/html401/charref/syntax

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http://lachy.id.au/
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