- From: Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi>
- Date: Fri, 16 May 2003 17:41:05 +0300
- To: www-html@w3.org
On Thursday, May 15, 2003, at 09:55 Europe/Helsinki, John Lewis wrote: > Karl wrote on Wednesday, May 14, 2003 at 4:22:29 PM: > >> 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. Not supporting character entities in XHTML is not a bug in Opera if 1) XHTML is an application of XML and 2) XHTML user agents aren't required to use validating XML processors. Presumably it is the intent of the XHTML 1.0 spec for 1) to be true, because otherwise the exercise of reformulating HTML 4.01 as XHTML 1.0 would be pointless. Making a requirement that made 2) false would be harmful because of the significant performance penalties for interactive user agents. (Requiring interactive XHTML user agents to deal with the complexity of grammar caching would be silly.) >> 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. Do you classify TextEdit (bundled with Mac OS X) and WordPad (bundled with Windows XP) as "special advanced authoring tools"? -- Henri Sivonen hsivonen@iki.fi http://www.iki.fi/hsivonen/
Received on Friday, 16 May 2003 10:41:12 UTC