HTML entities are not being preserved

[cimmanon]

All HTML entities found in my templates are being converted to the actual character (eg. & becomes &, © becomes ©). For most characters, this doesn't matter a whole lot, but a raw ampersand causes HTML validation to fail.

Template source:

<p class="copyright">&copy;2013 Company Name here</p>

Rendered document's source:

<p class='copyright'>©2013 Company Name here</p>

[cdsmith]

For the copyright symbol, this is expected behavior. The entity is
unnecessary as long as you're working in UTF-8 or another good enough
character set.

This is probably incorrect if it's happening for &. Are you sure it is?
Or just speculating?
On Oct 31, 2013 7:55 AM, "cimmanon" notifications@github.com wrote:

All HTML entities found in my templates are being converted to the actual
character (eg. & becomes &, © becomes ©). For most characters,
this doesn't matter a whole lot, but a raw ampersand causes HTML validation
to fail.

Template source:

©2013 Company Name here

Rendered document's source:

©2013 Company Name here

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com//issues/37
.

[mightybyte]

I just checked and it looks like it is indeed happening for &.

[mightybyte]

@cdsmith Any idea where this might be in xmlhtml?

[cdsmith]

https://github.com/snapframework/xmlhtml/blob/master/src/Text/XmlHtml/HTML/Render.hs#L60

Currently, it seems that the '&' character is only escaped when it is an "ambiguous ampersand", as defined at https://www.w3.org/TR/html5/syntax.html#text Non-ambiguous ampersands should not cause HTML validation to fail. I believe there is a reason this is done in this way, and I think it has something to do with certain browsers not liking the escaping of & inside a URL. I don't recall the details.

[mightybyte]

Hmmm, I can't decide what to do on this issue. The existing behavior appears to be correct, but on the other hand maybe a few unnecessary entities are tolerable if they are causing validation problems. I think I'm leaning slightly more towards closing this issue and leaving things as-is, but I could certainly be persuaded otherwise. Thoughts?