Re: " not in HTML 3.2?

[Dan Connolly]
> Arnoud Galactus Engelfriet wrote:
> > Why is the " entity not present in the latest HTML 3.2
> > specification, even though it is used in an example in the
> > documentation?
> 
> No good reason. It's a mistake.

Actually, since this has come up:

The ISO 8879 entity sets do not have definitions for the various
entities, only descriptions; " says "quotation mark".  Europeans
were responsible for the first association of glyphs or code-points
with entities, and those associations were incorporated into the
entity sets of ISO TR 9573; as a result, " is canonically defined
as ASCII 39 (or ISO 10646 x0027).

There is no entity reference for " (ASCII 34, ISO 10646 x0022).

This sucks in a big way.  I don't recommend *changing* the past
definition of " in HTML, but I do recommend simply leaving it
out.  Attribute values can be quoted by single-quotes (ASCII 39), and
can thus contain double-quotes; for values that need to contain both,
quote the value in single-quotes and use ' for internal
single-quotes (which should be defined in the HTML DTD as CDATA
"'").

-Chris
-- 
Christopher R. Maden                  One Richmond Square
DynaText SIT Technical Support        Providence, RI 02906 USA
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Received on Monday, 3 March 1997 15:20:34 UTC