Re: SM

On Fri, 5 May 2000 Jukka.Korpela@hut.fi wrote:

> On Thu, 4 May 2000, Joe Kaczmarek wrote:
> 
> > Sorry for causing such an uproar. I didn't originally ask "Should I code
> > 'TM' as ™?" I asked about the future of including 'SM'.
> 
> You originally asked:
>   Is "sm" an entity as "tm" (™) is?
>   If not, will it be?
> 
> Hopefully the incorrect assumptions have now been clarified.
> 
> Hopefully you have learned to check the existing specifications
> as regards to the current status.
> 
> As regards to the future inclusion of new entities, hopefully not.
> It would be rather pointless to add entities to myriads of
> characters. They have already caused confusion, since different
> browsers have started supporting different spellings (like &tm;
> and ™, or — and &emdash;).
> 
> Remember that those entities are _only_ symbolic names for
> constants (so to say). You can just use the numeric references.
> (See http://www.hut.fi/u/jkorpela/html/unicode.html for practical
> info on finding them.)

Of course, with XML/XHTML (handled by an XML processor) you will
be able to define your own entities in the doctype declaration, so
you could define 

<!ENTITY sm  "&#xxxx;" >

(xxxx = the numeric reference)  to get around remembering numeric
references. This is a far more scalable solution that is not available
with HTML (and HTML processors), unfortunately.

Ian
---
http://www.utoronto.ca/ian/books/

Received on Friday, 5 May 2000 11:10:27 UTC