[Bug 13108] Add &zwsp; as named character reference for zero width space (U+200B)

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=13108

David Carlisle <davidc@nag.co.uk> changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
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                 CC|                            |davidc@nag.co.uk

--- Comment #2 from David Carlisle <davidc@nag.co.uk> 2011-07-01 08:48:48 UTC ---
As noted in the negative effects there is already a name for this
(ZeroWidthSpace) although admittedly that's a bit long for zero width space:-)

The other four names are not really to be used; they are just there for
historical legacy compatibility reasons in an xml context (where removing an
entity definition can introduce fatal errors to a document)

Is there actually a use case for using 200B as opposed to 200C (zwnj) or 200D
(zwj) or is it mainly just that IE supports it so people will try to use it?
(IE supporting it may in fact be a good enough reason).

I think it's important that the XML and HTML entity sets stay in sync now we've
finally got them aligned so if this is added we need to do a second edition of
the xml entities spec.

http://www.w3.org/TR/2010/REC-xml-entity-names-20100401/

although we probably need to do a 2nd edition of that in any case, the editor's
edition already contains information about the new Arabic mathematical
alphabets in the 1E000 block and other characters added at Unicode 6.x.

http://www.w3.org/2003/entities/2007doc/Overview.html#changes20100401

As a general rule the Math WG has always resisted adding new names, as the
potential introduction of fatal xml parse errors is a high price to pay for
what is essentially a cosmetic and deprecated xml feature anyway. However the
tradeoffs in an HTML context are different, so I'm not necessarily totally
opposed to adding new characters that are requested by the HTML WG.

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Received on Friday, 1 July 2011 08:49:00 UTC