Characters, entities and references from Richard Ishida on 2008-03-28 (public-i18n-core@w3.org from January to March 2008)

From: Richard Ishida <ishida@w3.org>
Date: Fri, 28 Mar 2008 19:04:07 -0000
To: <public-i18n-core@w3.org>
Message-ID: <00b101c89106$7fab1950$7f014bf0$@org>

Folks,

I did a quick summary of how XML, HTML4 and HTML5 spec refer to &#xA0; &#160; and &nsbp; constructs at http://rishida.net/blog/?page_id=147

The most worrying thing is that HTML5 is creating a whole new set of names for these things.  So that we have a chance of being understood in the future when talking about these constructs in reviews, guidelines or talks, I propose we write to them and ask them to rename things as follows:

Character entity references -> character references OR character escapes

Named entities -> character entity references

Decimal numeric entities -> decimal numeric character references

Hexadecimal numeric entities -> hexadecimal numeric character references

Does everyone agree?

Perhaps we should even establish some guidelines for naming these things in specs in general.

RI

============
Richard Ishida
Internationalization Lead
W3C (World Wide Web Consortium)
 
http://www.w3.org/International/
http://rishida.net/blog/
http://rishida.net/

Received on Friday, 28 March 2008 19:04:19 UTC