Last modified: 2011-03-13 18:05:20 UTC
In both HTML and Wikimarkup, &...; (with something replacing the dots) can be used to represent a character. However, <nowiki>&...;</nowiki> shows the character, not the markup (possibly undesirable behaviour). More surprisingly, <nowiki>&.</nowiki><nowiki>..;</nowiki> (with something replacing the dots again) also shows the character rather than its markup, which is contrary to both the expected behaviour of nowiki and the behaviour of HTML. The third example (and possibly the second) should render as "&...;", not the character, to behave as I expect.
I was surprised by this too, but I assume it was intended. Some may want to use — or whatnot for readability in the edit window (although this is frowned upon on enwiki), while still having the special character itself display, and this concern is no less valid inside <nowiki>. I'd be inclined to say to leave it as it is, because both sides have some merit and the merit of not breaking existing pages outweighs any difference.
(In reply to comment #1) > I was surprised by this too, but I assume it was intended. I'd agree with you about not breaking existing behaviour in the second case, but I can't think of a situation where someone would write the third case and intend the special character still to render (after all, <span>&.</span><span>..;</span> would show the markup rather than the character, so why should it be different with <nowiki>?)
That's what it's there for.
