lynx-dev entities and the sortaSGML parser

[Alan J. Flavell]

A discussion on the usenet group c.i.w.browsers.misc showed that
a broken document such as 
http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/WWWfeatdisplay.cgi?1998120351R
wasn't getting its entities interpreted (é etc.).

(Using the tag-soup parser produces a result that's more in
accordance with what the misguided document author presumably
intended.)

[N.B I'm not here concerned with the — rubbish that's in
there too.]

On a hunch, I tried a simple document such as
http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/tests/hunch.html
and verified that an entity that appears within a TABLE but outside
of any table row TR will be displayed by Lynx _without_ its
entities being interpreted.

I note that text that's outside of a table cell (e.g TD), but inside
of a table row (a situation that's also illegal, of course) gets its
entities interpreted. 

I didn't look too closely at the original document, apart from
noting via HTML validation that it is very badly broken.  While
not for a moment wanting to misplace the blame here, the final
results as seen by the reader do seem rather odd.  I was wondering
whether the developers could see some way around this, if only for
cosmetic effect.

best regards