- From: Martin J. Dürst <mduerst@ifi.unizh.ch>
- Date: Fri, 22 Aug 1997 14:46:07 +0200 (MET DST)
- To: "E. Stephen Mack" <estephen@emf.net>
- cc: www-html@w3.org
On Fri, 22 Aug 1997, E. Stephen Mack wrote: > Side issue -- given the hugeness of the Unicode character set > and the convenience of named entities, I predict that future > versions of HTML may add new named entities. Perhaps the > HTML 4.0 spec could add a section telling user agents how to > treat unrecognized named entities. I think this is already dealt with in SGML. Just displaying them verbatim is correct. So at least Netscape is correct in this respect. > If HTML 5.0 introduces the &foo; named entity, how should a > pre-HTML 5.0 browser treat &foo; if it sees it? Displaying > the literal sequence "&foo;" strikes me as a less-than optimal > solution. > > (Perhaps a universal fallback mechanism to access a central W3C > standard library of entities, with images of the correct glyphs > if no font is available?) That mechanism is almost in place (as far as characters are concerned; not for the glyphs, anyway). If you use an URL in the DOCTYPE to refer to the W3C DTD, an apprpriately constructed system will included the definitions for these named entities, and convert them first to numeric character references and then to the characters themselves. Regards, Martin.
Received on Friday, 22 August 1997 08:46:00 UTC