numeric character references goofy in "3.Character entities"

Finishing stuff up for the day, and I saw...

"[11:19] <DaveR> i am looking it up in ref book.
[11:21] <DaveR> character entities is definitely correct for &#nnn; "

No it's not. Dave, what part of the handbook were you looking
at?

They're called numeric character references. You can generalize
to character references, but they're not entity references,
and they're certainly not entities nor character entities.

In ISO8879, the TOC looks like:

	9 Common Constructs
		...
		9.4 Entity References
			...
		9.5 Character Reference

See also, "4.37 character reference" and "4.217 numeric character
reference"


Perhaps the smallest edit to make the HTML 4 spec correct
would be to change "3 Character entities" to "3 Character references".
Calling an entity reference like &amp; a character reference
is less than 100% precise, but it's not wrong the way the current
spec is.

-- 
Dan
http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/

Received on Tuesday, 28 October 1997 19:33:40 UTC