homogenized XML Entity Names and AT

aloha!

i decided to forwarded the following post to wai-xtech in order to 
ascertain if the creation of a homogeneous set of XML entity names 
across vocabularies has ramifications for assistive technologies...

   http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-entity-names/

in particular, does an AT need to know how to interpret character 
entities directly?  to use a legacy example from HTML4x (in which 
character entities are contained in a DTD), does an AT need to be able 
to identify " as a quote, so that any switching the user has set to 
distinguish a quote is invoked when the character entity is encountered, 
or is this strictly a back-plane issue: does an AT receive and deliver to 
the user what the UA interprets a specific character entity as, or will 
this effect the alternative rendering of documents using character 
entity sets, and if so, what stake does the WAI have in this effort?  
is it merely a case of ATs needing to fully support unicode, or at least
the discrete set outlined in:

   http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-entity-names/

thanks for any enlightenment you can provide,
gregory.
------------------------------------------------------
It is better to ask some of the questions than to know 
all the answers.                      -- James Thurber
------------------------------------------------------
Gregory J. Rosmaita, oedipus@hicom.net
         Camera Obscura: http://www.hicom.net/~oedipus
------------------------------------------------------

---------- Forwarded Message -----------
From: Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>
  To: public-xhtml2@w3.org
  Cc: David Carlisle <davidc@nag.co.uk>
Sent: Mon, 7 Apr 2008 01:31:22 +0000 (UTC)
Subj: &lang; and &rang; entities

Hi,

There is an effort underway (coordinated by David Carlisle) to create a 
homogeneous set of entity names across vocabularies:

   http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-entity-names/

There are two entities in this group, &lang; and &rang;, which for 
historical reasons and compatibility with HTML4 are currently mapped to 
characters that have a canonical mapping to CJK fullwidth characters 
(U+2329 and U+232A, mapping to U+3008 and U+3009). As part of the HTML5 
work, the HTML5 spec was updated to map these two entities to more 
appropriate characters (U+27E8 and U+27E9).

Will XHTML2 have entities? If so, have you any opinion on whether &lang; 
or &rang; should be part of the XHTML2 set of entities, and what values 
they should have? Any input would be very helpful, so that we can keep 
these entities with a consistent meaning across any language that uses 
entity names.

Cheers,
-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
------- End of Forwarded Message -------

Received on Wednesday, 9 April 2008 17:41:55 UTC