Re: [xml-dev] W3C XML Core WG requests comment: control characters in XML 1.1

From: "John Cowan" <jcowan@reutershealth.com>
 
> Rick Jelliffe wrote:
> 
> > A control character may be a character or an embedded signal (i.e. a PI)
> > but it is certainly not an element.
> 
> Of course not.  But it may be *represented* by an element.

What is the difference between being represented by an element and being
an element?  

> > It would be better to reserve special characters which (like &lt;) are
> > not allowed as literals,
> > for all the C0 and C1 controls.
> 
> I don't understand this idea.  You mean magic entity references?
> The trouble is that "&lt;" is not actually magic, except that
> it needs no declaration: it has a definite replacement text.
> Something like "&BEL;" would have no legal replacement.

No,  &BEL; would have definite replacement text: the Unicode
character of that number. It would just have particular serialization
rules, as do many characters.
 
For a rather more worked-out proposal for using elements to represent
arbitrary characters, see my conference paper "Elements for Non-Unicode 
Characters in XML" at
  http://www.ascc.net/~ricko/xcs/missing_chars.html
(which was presented as part of a report on my interests at Academia Sinica
http://www.ascc.net/~ricko/ethnology.html
along with DrLove, as proposal for using RDF to describe Document Resources
 http://www.ascc.net/~ricko/drlove.htm.


Cheers
Rick Jelliffe