Re: questions about entities and entity declarations

On Mon, 30 Sep 96 01:05:45 CDT, Robert Streich <streich@slb.com> wrote:

>At 12:30 AM 9/26/96 GMT, Charles F. Goldfarb wrote:
>>This proposal only dealt with entities. I haven't seen any sentiment to abolish
>>character references. I would support keeping them. (Obviously, we have to
>if we
>>are going to exclude internal SDATA entities.)
>
>Charles, I agree with your proposal except for this. Numeric character
>references don't work since you can't reliably predict what glyph will be
>displayed for that value.
>
>What is wrong with the SDATA entities anyway? Is there an alternative
>suggestion such that you can use a symbolic name for the desired glyph
>so that the application can then use whatever font is available that
>contains that glyph?
>

I don't see much difference between a character number and an alphabetic symbol.
Both ultimately have to be mapped to some character semantic, and thence to a
glyph. But that mapping should occur in the style sheet. 

If you want to use symbolics, use the existing ISO character entity sets and
remove the SDATA keyword, since the entity text isn't system-specific data. (I
originally intended those declarations to be templates for real system data, but
no one uses them that way, I've been told.)

But I'm happy to leave the resolution of character set issues to those more
passionate about them than I. I only proposed eliminating internal SDATA to
simplify entity declarations and because, unlike external SDATA entities, there
is no standardized way to  specify a notation. Of course, we could adopt the
convention that I (and others) proposed earlier for PIs, but that would still
leave us with a special kind of internal entity, and I think that XML should
have all its internal entities resolved.
--
Charles F. Goldfarb * Information Management Consulting * +1(408)867-5553
           13075 Paramount Drive * Saratoga CA 95070 * USA
  International Standards Editor * ISO 8879 SGML * ISO/IEC 10744 HyTime
 Prentice-Hall Series Editor * CFG Series on Open Information Management
--

Received on Monday, 30 September 1996 09:04:34 UTC