Re: HTML 5 removed "numeric character reference" term - why?

Ian Hickson wrote:
>
> On Mon, 18 Jun 2007, Mike Brown wrote:

[...]

> > "Character entity references" are a class of "entity references" --
> > references to named entities (a fairly well-defined concept in SGML and
> > XML) -- where the entities consist of single characters.

I've never seen the term "character entity reference" referring to a
character reference with a single entity name. HTML 4 uses the term to refer
to character references[1].

> The problem is I need a term that means both "character entity references"
> [...]

There really is no such thing, except in HTML 4. Neither SGML nor XML uses
the term "character entity reference".

> [...] and "numeric character references" [...]

... and hex character references I presume.

> [...] and isn't unwieldly. Any suggestions?

Not really. Why do they have to fall under the same category?


Mike Brown wrote:

> "Character references" seems sufficiently general to me.

The thing is that the spec now uses "character entity reference" to refer
to both character references and entity references (which should be clear
by now). So naming the just "character references" would not include entity
references at all.

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/charset.html#h-5.3.2

-- 
David Håsäther

Received on Friday, 22 June 2007 08:47:11 UTC