HTML entities without semicolon not parsed when written in one word with other text

[vshabanov]

Not sure about whether it HTML5 compatible but text like &micrometer and rock&amproll should be parsed as µmeter and rock&roll, all major browsers do this.

You could see some test cases in testUnescapeHtml function in https://github.com/vshabanov/fast-tagsoup/blob/master/Text/HTML/TagSoup/Test.hs

[ndmitchell]

Thanks for the info, confirmed in all HTML5 compliant browsers, so I expect the spec does say that.

[seagreen]

For reasons described here (scroll down to "Errors involving fragile syntax constructs") using a named character reference not followed by a semicolon is an error in HTML 5. Here's the actual part of the document describing how to interpret character references -- it definitely requires the following semicolon.

However since tagsoup is designed to deal with real-world HTML and Firefox and Chromium are unescaping &micrometer to µmeter for me it seems reasonable that tagsoup should do the same.

[ndmitchell]

The hope was that tagsoup would follow HTML5, and all browser authors would also follow HTML5 - that's the whole purpose of HTML5 - specifying the corner cases. But I guess this is one case where they diverged 😞