Re: ERB decisions on A.17, B.9, and other questions

At 08:56 PM 19/10/96 +0100, Michael Sperberg-McQueen wrote:

>>These declarations must be included automatically, if we hope to have
>>anyone _use_ XML. (Which does not seem to be a major concern, as far as I
>>can tell).
>
>Come on, now.  The question of including some entities automatically
>is on the table, and has been addressed by several postings, most in
>favor, as far as I can remember.  The proposals I've heard so far are
>(a) just lt, gt, and amp (possibly augmented by declarations for ' and
>"), (b) the above plus ISOLat1, and (c) everything in HTML (which
>version?).  If you are hoping for automatic inclusion of Tengwar and
>other similar scripts, I predict disappointment.  Or even Middle
>Egyptian, for that matter.  If you think we should decide to include
>them automatically without worrying about the form of their declaration,
>then I respectfully but vigorously disagree.

I have one small problem here with the decision to drop FPIs. If we expect
people to include their own sets a simple way of identifying well known sets
of useful characters, such as the sets identified in 10646, would be useful.
If we have to use system identifiers to do this then everyone is going to
assign his own name to these sets. If we were able to use FPIs we could at
least point people to a file containing FPIs for each of the sets in 10646
so that they could have a common starting point for including these
standardized sets of useful characters. How do you envisage people
identifying which character sets they have used as the basis for their
numeric SDATA specifications?
----
Martin Bryan, The SGML Centre, Churchdown, Glos. GL3 2PU, UK 
Phone/Fax: +44 1452 714029   WWW home page: http://www.u-net.com/~sgml/

Received on Sunday, 20 October 1996 05:48:06 UTC