Re: Extraneous Characters in Netscape Display

lilley (lilley@afs.mcc.ac.uk)
Thu, 25 May 1995 07:50:25 +0500


Larry Alexander said:

> <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//Netscape Corp.//DTD HTML plus Tables//EN"
> "html-net.dtd"[<!ENTITY pound CDATA "">]>
>
> but I still see the "]>" in Netscape.
>
> Is HoTMetaL doing something illegal with the !ENTITY declaration?

Nope. Inadvisible, but not illegal. It is just writing a totally valid
SGML construct that Netscape (and indeed many other browsers) are
not expecting and cannot handle.

They deal with the doctype declaration as an unknown tag, it ignore
it and present it's content. They also assume it is terminated by >
and they are not expecting a nested occurence of < > inside the tag.

Hence, the closing ]> is treated as text and displayed.

-- 
Chris Lilley, Technical Author
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