Re: Disturbing IE 4.0pp2 behavior for lang="en"

At 03:59 22/08/97 -0700, E. Stephen Mack wrote:
>Side issue -- given the hugeness of the Unicode character set
>and the convenience of named entities, I predict that future
>versions of HTML may add new named entities.  Perhaps the
>HTML 4.0 spec could add a section telling user agents how to
>treat unrecognized named entities.
>
>If HTML 5.0 introduces the &foo; named entity, how should a
>pre-HTML 5.0 browser treat &foo; if it sees it?  Displaying
>the literal sequence "&foo;" strikes me as a less-than optimal
>solution.

The solution I recommend is a way to include external files with entity
definitions. Thus the entity names need not be part of the HTML
specification. There may be some standard entity name sets defined for some
lnguages.

At 14:46 22/08/97 +0200, Martin J. Dürst wrote:
>That mechanism is almost in place (as far as characters are
>concerned; not for the glyphs, anyway). If you use an URL
>in the DOCTYPE to refer to the W3C DTD, an apprpriately
>constructed system will included the definitions for these
>named entities, and convert them first to numeric character
>references and then to the characters themselves.

An SGML solution is theoretically possible, but there is no indication
anyone is planning to implement it.

Jonathan

Received on Friday, 22 August 1997 13:33:19 UTC