RE: sbquo vs bdquo from Dave J Woolley on 2000-09-29 (www-html@w3.org from September 2000)

From: Dave J Woolley <david.woolley@bts.co.uk>
Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2000 18:36:35 +0100
To: W3C HTML <www-html@w3.org>
Message-ID: <81E4A2BC03CED111845100104B62AFB5824A69@stagecoach.bts.co.uk>

> From:	Russell Steven Shawn O'Connor [SMTP:roconnor@alumni.uwaterloo.ca]
> 
> Isn't it weird that the entity for a single bottom quote is &sbquo; while
> the entity for a double bottom quote is &bdquo;?  I suppose it is way way
> to late to change the entity name for double bottom quote to &dbquo; to be
> more consistent with everything else.
> 
	[DJW:]  I believe it is no longer considered a good idea
	to add named entities, which may not be known to browsers,
	even though they understand Unicode and can display the
	intended character.  In the worst case, new ones can
	break HTML that relies on browser error recovery for broken
	entities to allow GET type form URLs to be used in anchors
	without replacing the &'s with &amp; (or ; with cooperating
	servers).

	It was probably valid when browsers were limited to
	ISO 8859/1 and, say, an uninterpreted &copy; would be more
	useful than an uninterpreted &#169;
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Received on Friday, 29 September 2000 13:36:57 UTC