Re: Entities names?

>Search a huge table? Search?!? What about using a hash lookup for
>entities if speed is a concern?

Apologies for the inexact terminology. I used "search" instead of "lookup",
regardless of the implementation.

I personally don't think that "‹" is that much harder to read than
"‹", especially for any non-English HTML author, because "‹" is
a straight index into the Unicode reference on my desk. Of course the more
named entities you add, the more obscure names you need to make up for them.

Chris..


-----Original Message-----
From: Rob <wlkngowl@unix.asb.com>
To: Chris Wendt <christw@microsoft.com>; www-html@w3.org <www-html@w3.org>
Date: Friday, August 22, 1997 3:32 PM
Subject: Entities names?


"Chris Wendt" <christw@microsoft.com> wrote on Fri, 22 Aug 1997 11:58:38:

> [..]
> I haven't seen any proof for the added "convenience" of adding more and
more
> named entities. In the contrary this slows down the parser (you need to
> search a huge table) and transmission size (each character takes more
bytes
  ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> than any other known document encoding).

Search a huge table? Search?!? What about using a hash lookup for
entities if speed is a concern?

  character := entityTable[ hash(entityName) ]

Certainly the computing time to calculate a hash of several
characters to calculate an index in a table is minimal enough not to
degrade from performace, unless a document is filled with hundreds of
entity names.

As for the extra size issue, the added characters for entity
references is insignificant.

I favor source readability (even if I am using special software to
create a web page) over brevity.

Side question: will PNG images be added to MSIE so they can be
included using <IMG> or does one have to rely on plugins and the use
of <OBJECT> which is handled in a buggy manner by most browsers
(enough to make me avoid using it for years).

Rob
---
Robert Rothenburg Walking-Owl (wlkngowl@unix.asb.com)
(Se habla PGP.) http://www.wusb.org/mutant/

Received on Friday, 22 August 1997 20:07:20 UTC