Named entities present in WP core

[sampablokuper]

The entity ' ' is referenced in wp-includes/comment-template.php . While this is fine for most doctypes, it is ​not universally trouble-free.

I propose that instances of ' ' in this file be replaced with ' ' and that if there are any other named character references in WP core files, then those should also be replaced with their numeric equivalents.

With luck, this will be a painless fix :)

That link reads to me like the issue is not the fact that named entities are used but that the rendering engine (browser) you are using does not know about the DTD you are using and so falls back to plain vanila xml.

Surely a named entity like   is valid for the RDFa in XHTML spec and so in that context the document is valid?

Replying to westi:

That link reads to me like the issue is not the fact that named entities are used but that the rendering engine (browser) you are using does not know about the DTD you are using and so falls back to plain vanila xml.

That does seem to be what's happening, but since it happens in WebKit and Gecko-based browsers, the userbase potentially affected is large.

Surely a named entity like   is valid for the RDFa in XHTML spec and so in that context the document is valid?

Perhaps, but it still causes problems. OTOH, getting rid of named entities other than the 5 predefined XML entities in WP core is a very small task and easy to maintain by using NCRs or their corresponding UTF-8 characters instead.

Another reason in favour of this is that people who want to use WordPress to ​serve XHTML with XSDs instead of DTDs will benefit too.

patch leaves the following untouched:

• javascript libraries
• charmaps

it changes them everywhere else

Replying to Denis-de-Bernardy:

patch leaves the following untouched:

• javascript libraries
• charmaps

it changes them everywhere else

Thanks for doing this. I haven't tested it, just had a quick look at the diff. I notice that in addition to replacing the named entities, you've made a few other changes, e.g. to wp-admin/edit-link-form.php and wp-admin/edit-page-form.php . Are these related? Sorry if I'm being dense!

Thanks,

Sam

not at all, but it was faster to do them all at once with a mass find/replace selected.

patch is broken

Might be best to stick to one patch per ticket.

In what way is it broken?

it's loaded with Hunk #X FAILED at YYY... needs to be redone.

Redone.

Replaces almost all named entities by their numeric counterparts (hand checked).

I made a patch of this (and most other entities) using trunk-21080. I attached it here.

Related: #7098, #8714, #13341, #14225

Version field indicates when the enhancement was initially suggested.

#8714 suggests an opposite change (to standardize on …).

Getting rid of named entities in core doesn't sound like something we want to do. Even though there's a somewhat recent patch, the ticket had no other traction for two years. I guess it's safe to close it along with #13341.

I can deal with that. But I would like to see #13341 fixed sometime soon. I was having issues with that earlier.