Re: those predeclared entity refs

At 6:37 PM 3/13/97, lee@sq.com wrote:
>Perhaps we also need apostrophe and grave accent.  Note that there
>is no single quote in ASCII, as ' is an apostrophe and ` is a grave
>accent.  The typewriter doube quote (") makes the fifth, right?
>
>amp     ampersand                 &
>lt      left angle bracket        <
>quot    grave accent              `
>apos    apostrophe                '
>dquot   typewriter double quote   "
>
>That makeds five; do we also need
>gt      right angle brcket        >
>or
>ket     right bracket             ]

Does Unicode or 10646 really define "<" and ">" as left and right
angle brackets?  In most of the character sets I've seen, they are
less-than and greater-than signs.  And those character sets that
mention angle brackets treat them as different characters.  (Not
to mention that they are usually associated with different glyphs
in any glyph-rich font.)

Same question about "`".  Really just a stand-alone accent?

What authority says that the &quot entity is "`"?  I always thought
it was "'".  For that matter, I know of systems whose character
repertoires differentiate between apostrophe and single closing quote!
and neither one is the "typwriter single quote" that "'" was at
least originally meant to be.

I assume you just made up "ket" as a name for "]"?

Seems to me we don't even agree on what our "ASCII" character set
really is.

When you're writing a standard, you can't say "left angle bracket"
when you mean "less than".  You'll get different results.

Besides clarifying just what characters we're talking about, there
are some more important questions being glossed over in this
discussion:

    o   Do the implied entity definitions for &amp, &lt, and &gt (the
        current required set) take precedence over local ones?  Currently
        they do.  (And *currently* must, see next bullet.)

    o   Is the user *required* to use these three to escape "&", "<",
        and ">", rather than any other entities he or she may have
        available, or even other mechanisms for escaping?  As I read
        the Nov 96 spec, this is a requirement.  I don't like it.

BTW, the spec says that you are to escape "]]>" as "]]&gt;".

Dave Peterson
SGMLWorks!

davep@acm.org

Received on Friday, 14 March 1997 10:06:14 UTC