Re: Positive Re. Symbolic name for every character

* Cyril wrote:
>	For example, an HTML-file contains an Apocalypse copy and the author of
>the file wants to specify meta-information in this file with word
>Apocalypse in several languages such as Greek, Hebrew, English, French,
>German, Russian, Swedish, and so on.

Why should he want to do that? What do I want on a say russian page
after searching for say <... xml:lang='de'>"Offenbarung"</...>?

>	With symbolic names equipped with language property, it could be done
>easily:
>	<META  name = "keywords" content =
>"&Alpha-el;&pi-el;&omicron-el;&kappa-el;&alpha-el;&lambda-el;&upsilon-el;&pi-el;&sigma-el;&iota-el;&sigmaf-el;,
>&?-he;&?-he;&?-he;&?-he;&?-he;, apocalypse,
>&a-fr;&p-fr;&o-fr;&c-fr;&a-fr;&l-fr;&y-fr;&p-fr;&s-fr;&e-fr;,
>&O-ru;&te-ru;&ka-ru;&er-ru;&o-ru;&ve-ru;&ie-ru;&en-ru;&i-ru;&ie-ru;,
>...">
>	How could you do this otherwise?

  <meta name='keywords' xml:lang='fr' content='...' />
  <meta name='keywords' xml:lang='de' content='...' />
  <meta name='keywords' xml:lang='ru' content='...' />

Please note that Entity references can't work for this purpose, they are
just mapped to some possibly empty strings and their name cannot contain
any machine-readable semantic value. Not to mention that this proposal
turns words unreadable for humans.

>	At last, presenting characters with symbolic names is just an
>alternative way of character references. So anyone could use another
>method to represent characters, whatever one likes. For example, one
>could use Unicode. But sometimes, for example, when you receive your
>e-mail on an internet cafe's computer in a foreign country, you could be
>forced to read HTML-source. Look at example below; what is better to
>read, upper or lower one?
>	(The upper one) ...
>&#961;&#949;&#945;&#955;&#953;&#963;&#956;&#959;&#962; ...
>	(The lower one) ...
>&rho-el;&epsilon-el;&alpha-el;&lambda-el;&iota-el;&sigma-el;&mu-el;&omicron-el;&sigmaf-el;
>...

I don't read HTML mails and if I want to, I won't do it by reading the
source.
-- 
Björn Höhrmann { mailto:bjoern@hoehrmann.de } http://www.bjoernsworld.de
am Badedeich 7 } Telefon: +49(0)4667/981028 { http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de
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Received on Friday, 10 August 2001 22:43:14 UTC