Re: XHTML2 MIME type

Karl wrote on Wednesday, May 14, 2003 at 4:22:29 PM:

> That's because you're just used the using the entities.

The reason I favor the named entities over the numeric entities is
that the numeric entities are harder for me to remember. If the
numeric entities were easier to remember, I'd be familiar with them.

> I *can* see that character entities are somewhat useful, and are
> easy to remember (or guess the names of), but I don't think this is
> a *compelling* reason to keep them in XHTML 2 (and entities are
> *not* useful if browsers don't support them, as seems to be the case
> now, at least for Opera).

A bug in the current version of a particular UA is no reason to remove
something from XHTML2. Besides, the same can be said of anything else.
For example, the section element is useless in browsers that don't
support it. Current realities shouldn't limit our future goals.

(Opera does recognize named entities in HTML.)

> And remember that character entities only cover a tiny subset (a few
> hundreds?) of the characters available in Unicode. There are almost
> 100,000 thousands characters in the latest version of ISO 10646
> (IIRC) which are *not* accessible using character entities. The
> existing character entities doesn't really *solve* the problem of
> entering characters not directly available on the user's keyboard.

The purpose of the named entities isn't to provide access to every
character, but to provide mnemonics for easy access to common
characters. Dropping the named entities would worsen the problem. It
would be a waste of time to assign every character with a named
entity.

> And there are many ways authoring tools can, and have been
> supporting non-ASCII characters, e.g. 'insert symbol' dialogues or
> drop-down menus. If one insist on using tools *not suited for*
> editing XML documents, one can only blame the tools, not the XML
> standards.

I don't see any reason to require special advanced authoring tools to
write XHTML. That's something XHTML should strive to avoid.

-- 
John Lewis

Received on Thursday, 15 May 2003 03:00:40 UTC