- From: Jukka Korpela <jkorpela@cc.hut.fi>
- Date: Wed, 24 Mar 1999 08:45:39 +0200 (EET)
- To: www-html@w3.org
On Tue, 23 Mar 1999, Alan G. Isaac wrote: > Looking at the mathematical operators, > I am very puzzled. There is a perfectly > good set of entity names in extremely > wide use: the TeX/LaTeX/AMSLaTeX > names. Why not simply adopt these rather > than inventing new ones? The entity names in HTML specifications have been taken from the character entity sets listed in appendix D to the SGML standard (ISO 8879-1986). It's actually not a big deal anyway. The entity names are just half-mnemonic, and as you point out, different names (or "names" - is something like "isin" or "ni" really a _name_ or just an alphanumeric symbol?) for characters are in use in other contexts (e.g. TeX, PostScript). Moreover, Netscape 4 does not support things like ∈ but it supports ∈ under certain conditions (see http://www.hut.fi/u/jkorpela/HTML/chars.html ). So authors might just as well use numeric character references, either finding them out themselves, which means some work, see http://www.hut.fi/u/jkorpela/html/unicode.html or (hopefully, in the future) using software which lets them enter characters conveniently and takes the trouble of inserting the (correct!) numeric references into the HTML code. Thus, I don't think future HTML specifications should extend the repertoire of entity names for characters. -- Yucca, http://www.hut.fi/u/jkorpela/ or http://yucca.hut.fi/yucca.html
Received on Wednesday, 24 March 1999 01:45:43 UTC