Re: A17: keep or drop entities?

At 12:18 PM 10/9/96, James Clark wrote:
>At 10:48 09/10/96 -0400, Gavin Nicol wrote:
>>>There is the problem, that I discovered following the pointer that you
>>>provided me, that not all of the character entities have an equivalent
>>>in Unicode. I've only skimmed over this issue so far, so I don't have
>>>complete information, but I think it is still an issue.
>>
>>We need SDATA internal entities for precisely the reason given
>>here.
>
>Why can't we use the private use zone in 10646 for this?

As a user (or developer) I would prefer that characters not in the
reference character set be identified by mnemonic strings rather than by
numbers. If the character is not on my local system, at least I have a name
that someone thought was indicative of the character in question. With a
private-use character code I know nothing other than that I don't know how
to render it. I might even have a local convention for private-use that
conflicts with the one in the document. Private use should be private, and
XML must be useful for interchange as well. I think of SDATA as the "alt"
attribute of character sets.

   -- David

_________________________________________
David Durand              dgd@cs.bu.edu  \  david@dynamicDiagrams.com
Boston University Computer Science        \  Sr. Analyst
http://www.cs.bu.edu/students/grads/dgd/   \  Dynamic Diagrams
--------------------------------------------\  http://dynamicDiagrams.com/
MAPA: mapping for the WWW                    \__________________________
http://www.dynamicdiagrams.com/services_map_main.html

Received on Wednesday, 9 October 1996 12:56:06 UTC