Re: Characters, entities and references

Hello Richard,

At 04:04 08/03/29, Richard Ishida wrote:
>
>Folks,
>
>I did a quick summary of how XML, HTML4 and HTML5 spec refer to   
>  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

The two changes above confuse me a bit, because you have
"character entity reference" once on the left side and once
on the right side. So I'd like to know what you mean in each
case (an example or two should do the job).

The two below are fine, although in general, in many cases,
the distinction doesn't have to be made.

BTW, XML doesn't use the term "character entity reference"
because it's just a very special case of an entity reference,
one where the replacement text consists of a single character.
 From a HTML viewpoint, the term "character entity reference"
makes more sense because these are the only entity references
available. It may make sense to add this clarification to your
blog entry.

Regards,   Martin.

>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/
>
> 


#-#-#  Martin J. Du"rst, Assoc. Professor, Aoyama Gakuin University
#-#-#  http://www.sw.it.aoyama.ac.jp       mailto:duerst@it.aoyama.ac.jp

Received on Monday, 31 March 2008 07:12:55 UTC