RE: New article for REVIEW: Using character entities and NCRs

Hi Steve,

Thanks for your comments. See  inline...

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Steve Zilles [mailto:szilles@adobe.com] 
> Sent: 19 July 2005 23:55
> To: Richard Ishida; www-international@w3.org
> Subject: Re: New article for REVIEW: Using character entities and NCRs
> 
> At 10:31 AM 7/19/2005, Richard Ishida wrote:
> 
> 	Title: Using character entities and NCRs
> 	http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-escapes
> 	
> 	Comments are being sought on this article prior to 
> final release. Please send any comments to 
> www-international@w3.org. We expect to publish a final 
> version in one to two weeks.
> 	
> 	The article aims to answer the question: "What are 
> character entities and NCRs, and when should I use them?"
> 
> 
> A few thoughts
> 
> This is great material and very useful. 
> 
> This article really seems to cover three different questions:
> 
> How, in XML, do I enter Unicode characters that are not 
> available to me in my application or via an operating system service?
> 
> When is it useful to use "escapes" to enter characters and 
> when should you avoid using escapes?
> 
> How do I use NCRs and Character entity escapes?

Choosing a question for these FAQs is a very complicated process. I agree
that these are good starting points for this article.  For now I think I
will add them to the topic index at
http://www.w3.org/International/resource-index.html#charset , though we may
well develop more focused articles in the future.



> 
> I would have found it more useful if the content were 
> distributed under those three titles; In particular, the 
> question that I find myself most interested in answering is 
> how do I enter a very small number of characters that are (a) 
> outside the set of characters that I normally use and (b) are 
> not easily found on the character picker that comes with 
> Windows. But, I do recognize that my usage might be special.

Not so special, and I think this would be worth a separate FAQ at some point
soon.  In the meantime you may find this of help, it has created a lot of
enthusiastic feedback:
http://people.w3.org/rishida/scripts/pickers/



> 
> Finally, the first sentence is a little daunting; how about 
> beginning, "XML (and  (X)HTML) have several "escapes" that 
> allow XML documents to represent Unicode characters as a 
> sequence of ASCII characters. These escapes include NCRs 
> (Numeric Character References) and character entities."

After a lot of playing around, I changed it to:
"You can use a character escape to represent any Unicode character in XML or
(X)HTML using only ASCII characters. NCRs (Numeric Character References) and
character entities are types of character escape. "

Cheers,
RI


> 
> 
> 
> 	============
> 	Richard Ishida
> 	W3C
> 	
> 	contact info:
> 	http://www.w3.org/People/Ishida/ 
> 	
> 	W3C Internationalization:
> 	http://www.w3.org/International/ 
> 	
> 	Publication blog:
> 	http://people.w3.org/rishida/blog/
> 	 
> 
>          Steve
> =====================================
> Steve Zilles 
> 115 Lansberry Court, 
> Los Gatos, CA 95032-4710
> steve@zilles.org 
> 
>

Received on Friday, 5 August 2005 17:41:34 UTC