Adding new character entities (was Re: [XHTML2] Unicode line and paragraph separators)

"Ernest Cline" <ernestcline@mindspring.com> wrote:

> Since XHTML1 has the Latin-1, Special and Symbol characters as sets of 
> defined entities that are part of the normative definition, I see no 
> problem in adding &ps; and &ls; to the set of special character 
> entities for XHTML2 if a decision were made to add them to XHTML2.

Back to 1999, the W3C Internationalization Working Group advised other
Working Groups not to add new character entities in W3C specifications.
Following that advice, the HTML WG has "frozen" the (X)HTML entity sets,
and various proposals for new character entities were rejected on that
basis.  There is a suggestion to develop a universal character entity set
for XML (not just for XHTML), but it is extremely unlikely that XHTML2
would add its own new character entities.

> Can 
> you name a single browser that supports XHTML1 as application/xhtml+xml 
> that does not support the three entity sets?

Opera 6/7, Netscape 6.x, Mozilla 0.9.8 and earlier, to name a few.

  cf. http://www.w3.org/People/mimasa/test/xhtml/entities/results

Regards,
-- 
Masayasu Ishikawa / mimasa@w3.org
W3C - World Wide Web Consortium

Received on Monday, 7 April 2003 05:39:05 UTC