RE: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

jonathan chetwynd wrote:

> by using character references or entity references
> is it meant "&lt" "&gt" for <> ?
> and if so what is the effect if one does?

I was mainly thinking about, say, the entity reference &eacute; (or the
equivalent character reference &#233;) that you could use to denote the
letter e with acute accent without actually writing that accented letter as
"raw" data into your document. This would circumvent the problem that it is
often difficult to authors to produce a document containing that letter in
UTF-8 encoded format.

These questions are interesting, important and often confusing, but since
there is no particular accessibility issue involved, I'd suggest taking this
is to a forum which is more suitable for general (X)HTML authoring
questions, such as news:comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html
As "mandatory" prerequisite to posting there, see its FAQ, specifically
question
http://www.htmlhelp.com/faq/html/design.html#entity-or-number
You might also check my treatise on character references and entity
references, an issue where - if I dare say it here! - even the W3C
recommendations do not always use consistent terminology:
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/chars/ref.html

-- 
Jukka Korpela, senior adviser
TIEKE Finnish Information Society Development Centre
http://www.tieke.fi
Phone: +358 9 4763 0397 Fax: +358 9 4763 0399

Received on Monday, 29 July 2002 07:11:30 UTC