i18n Polyglot Markup/NCRs (7th issue)

Richard Ishida, Tue, 13 Jul 2010 20:40:24 +0100:

> FWIW, the i18n group keeps track of comments on your doc at 
> http://www.w3.org/International/reviews/1007-polyglot/

	7th issue:	
 	]]
   8. Named Entity References	Named entity references	
   " For example, polyglot markup uses   instead of  . " 
   We would prefer your example to use the hexadecimal NER   
rather than the decimal. See 
http://www.w3.org/TR/2005/REC-charmod-20050215/#C048
   [[

	Comment: Why? Is that a special recommendation with regard to just the 
non-breaking-space character? As much as I know, the I18N WG have some 
documents which recommend using hexadecimal rather than decimal NCRs. 
Is that the issue you want to put through? However, how can Polyglot 
Markup have stronger requirements than XHTML and HTML have? I here get 
the feeling that it is your "this spec should not be a spec, but a 
friendly authoring guide" which comes through. You feel that you can 
give stricter (but friendlier, still?) requirements in a guide than in 
a spec.
	I can agree that the Polyglot Markup spec should mention the 
hexadecimal _as well as_ the decimal. But I see no reason to not 
mention the decimal.
	You may also want to consult bug 9300 [2]. It shows that if we want to 
create a maximum compatibility specification, then decimal NCRs are 
sometimes more IE compatible than hexadecimal ones are. That bug 
demonstrates, I dare say, a lot of the user agent bugs with regards to 
NCRs. If we want Polyglot Markup to be maximum compatible w.r.t. NCRS, 
then we should probably:
	1) recommend decimal NCRs over hexadecimal NCRs
	2) recommend authors to not add zeros in NCRs - e.g. require/recommend 
å rather than å
	3) for even better compatibility, one should not use NCRs ...
	However, to be honest, I am not 100% certain that we _should_ go down 
that road ...

[1] http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=9962
[2] http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=9300
-- 
leif halvard silli

Received on Thursday, 15 July 2010 21:01:22 UTC