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Bug 22447 - "using entity references for characters in XHTML documents is unsafe" should better be "using named character references for characters in XHTML documents is unsafe"
Summary: "using entity references for characters in XHTML documents is unsafe" should ...
Status: RESOLVED INVALID
Alias: None
Product: WHATWG
Classification: Unclassified
Component: HTML (show other bugs)
Version: unspecified
Hardware: Other other
: P3 normal
Target Milestone: Unsorted
Assignee: Ian 'Hixie' Hickson
QA Contact: contributor
URL: http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/...
Whiteboard:
Keywords:
: 22444 (view as bug list)
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2013-06-25 07:07 UTC by contributor
Modified: 2013-07-04 05:54 UTC (History)
3 users (show)

See Also:

Attachments

Description contributor 2013-06-25 07:07:05 UTC 
Specification: http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/the-xhtml-syntax.html
Multipage: http://www.whatwg.org/C#writing-xhtml-documents
Complete: http://www.whatwg.org/c#writing-xhtml-documents
Referrer: 

Comment:
"using entity references for characters in XHTML documents is unsafe" should
better be "using named character references for characters in XHTML documents
is unsafe"

Posted from: 180.7.144.181 by mike@w3.org
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_8_3) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/29.0.1547.0 Safari/537.36
Comment 1 Michael[tm] Smith 2013-06-25 07:08:37 UTC 
Maybe this is also what the reporter of bug 22444 was asking about...
Comment 2 Simon Pieters 2013-06-25 09:19:02 UTC 
...other than the 5 predefined ones...
Comment 3 Ian 'Hixie' Hickson 2013-07-02 23:08:09 UTC 
*** Bug 22444 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Comment 4 contributor 2013-07-02 23:10:20 UTC 
Checked in as WHATWG revision r8016.
Check-in comment: Make the XML terminology a bit more precise.
http://html5.org/tools/web-apps-tracker?from=8015&to=8016
Comment 5 Michael[tm] Smith 2013-07-03 02:37:02 UTC 
(In reply to comment #4)
> Checked in as WHATWG revision r8016.
> Check-in comment: Make the XML terminology a bit more precise.
> http://html5.org/tools/web-apps-tracker?from=8015&to=8016

-  the DOCTYPE. This means, for example, that using entity references
-  for characters in XHTML documents is unsafe if they are defined in
+  the DOCTYPE. This means, for example, that using character references
+  in XHTML documents is unsafe if they are defined in

How come just "using character references" and not "using named character references"?

I'd think the person who reported bug 22444 would probably now ask, "does 'character reference' refer to numeric character references or named character references?".
Comment 6 Ian 'Hixie' Hickson 2013-07-03 22:35:40 UTC 
Woops. This bug is actually invalid. We've been misreading the XML spec, and the old text was correct.

There's no such thing as "named character references" in XML. There's only numeric ones (and they're generally just called "character references"). "Entity references" covers all the named ones.
Comment 7 contributor 2013-07-03 22:35:48 UTC 
Checked in as WHATWG revision r8032.
Check-in comment: Oops, reverse r8016. I misread the XML spec.
http://html5.org/tools/web-apps-tracker?from=8031&to=8032
Comment 8 Michael[tm] Smith 2013-07-04 05:54:11 UTC 
(In reply to comment #6)
> Woops. This bug is actually invalid. We've been misreading the XML spec, and
> the old text was correct.
> 
> There's no such thing as "named character references" in XML. There's only
> numeric ones (and they're generally just called "character references").
> "Entity references" covers all the named ones.

So if we're confused about, clearly I think it's still likely to be confusing to some (a lot) readers of the spec. See bug 22574 for a suggestion about how to make it less confusing.