Re: HTML 5 removed "numeric character reference" term - why? from Mike Brown on 2007-06-22 (public-html@w3.org from June 2007)

From: Mike Brown <mike@skew.org>
Date: Fri, 22 Jun 2007 04:26:00 -0600 (MDT)
To: Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>
CC: Mike Brown <mike@skew.org>, David Håsäther <hasather@gmail.com>, public-html@w3.org
Message-Id: <200706221026.l5MAQ1cO040242@chilled.skew.org>

> > 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.
>  

I disagree; they're all references to characters.

> Ok...
> 
> Note that what the HTML5 spec has are not what SGML and XML have. In 
> HTML5, there are three things:
> 
>    &foo; - a way to include a character by name
>    &#99; - a way to include a codepoint by decimal number
>    &#x9; - a way to include a codepoint by hexidecimal number
> 
> They are no DTDs, so these aren't entities. All three are merely 
> equivalent ways of doing character escapes. They're the equivalent of the 
> CSS construct starting with a backslash: "\99".
> 

I'm OK with that. I just don't like seeing the word "entity", which has a 
certain meaning already, one we shouldn't mess with.

As I see it, there are numeric character references (decimal or hexadecimal 
based), and named character references.

The word entity doesn't need to enter into it.


> I'd be happy to use the term "character escapes" or some such. 

Although I think we all know what it means, I'm less favorable to that because 
"escape" imerial processing is expected, and undesirable consequences if left 
unescaped, which is only true for a very small number of characters.

Received on Friday, 22 June 2007 10:26:17 UTC