Re: Entities

Apologies for sending this in UTF-8, but it's the best way to show it.

Unicode has two methods of representing composite characters like:
precomposed characters and combining diacriticals.  The two methods would be
used as follows for the character in question:

ć
(U+0063 + U+0301; represented as entities as ć)

ć
(U+0107; represented as an entity as ć)

(Note that these are HEXADECIMAL values!)

The former is that defined in Normalization Form D; the latter, in
Normalization Form C (the preferred form for web documents according the
draft of the W3C Character Model I last read).

In Windows ME, Mozilla 2001052708, IE5.5, and Netscape 4.77 [!] all can
manage both forms in UTF-8 (what I tested), though the combination is poorly
spaced in the Moz/Net browsers (not surprising).  In Mozilla and IE (but not
Netscape 4.x), entities do work.  I have managed to get both to work before
in Linux with Mozilla (later than M17) with a font that included the correct
combining diacriticals characters, though such a font is not currently
available; and it might work in Konqueror as well.

> I would prefer tricks like that rather than introducing unicode.

The suggestion that rather than supporting Unicode-based technologies Amaya
should kludge together its own method of supporting only those character
combinations that are requested by users is I would think counter to the
spirit of standards support.

Patrick Rourke
ptrourke@methymna.com

----- Original Message -----
From: "Dave J Woolley" <david.woolley@bts.co.uk>
To: <www-amaya@w3.org>
Sent: Tuesday, May 29, 2001 2:37 PM
Subject: RE: Entities


> > From: Christian Mondrup [SMTP:scancm@biobase.dk]
> >
> > Somewat related to the question: is it possible with some kind of
> > backspace entity to force accents on letters which are else not
> [DJW:]
> In theory, you can use UTF-8 (-16 etc) or numeric
> character entities to introduce the Unicode characters
> for non-spacing accents (or the actual accented characters).
>
> I'd be surprised to find a browser that supports this,
> although it might be worth trying IE 5.5 or IE 6 using the
> full Unicode font from Office 2000.
>
> In almost all cases, using the Unicode accented characters is
> going to be a better approach than using non-spacing accents.
>
> --
> --------------------------- DISCLAIMER ---------------------------------
> Any views expressed in this message are those of the individual sender,
> except where the sender specifically states them to be the views of BTS.
>
>
> >
>
>

Received on Tuesday, 29 May 2001 16:51:16 UTC