special entities: < > & and "

Marc Andreessen ([email protected])
Wed, 6 Oct 93 14:14:34 -0500

Kevin Altis writes:
> I seem to remember that you used to have to quote the special characters <
> > & and " within an HTML document so that & becomes &amp, " becomes &quot,
> < and > become &lt and &gt This is documented in the draft HTML
> specification (actually the &lt and &gt aren't in there), but I've tried it
> out with XMosaic and I don't have to quote the characters at all within
> normal text. If the quoting rule only applies within an URL or as part of a
> tag then it should be documented as such with examples. What's the real
> story Tim?

Don't use Mosaic to *validate* your HTML -- use a DTD and an SGML
parser. Mosaic handles many error cases cleanly, but they're still
error cases.

Marc