Re: New article for REVIEW: Using character entities and NCRs

At 10:31 AM 7/19/2005, Richard Ishida wrote:



>Title: Using character entities and NCRs
>http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-escapes
>
>Comments are being sought on this article prior to final release. Please 
>send any comments to www-international@w3.org. We expect to publish a 
>final version in one to two weeks.
>
>The article aims to answer the question: "What are character entities and 
>NCRs, and when should I use them?"

A few thoughts

This is great material and very useful.

This article really seems to cover three different questions:

How, in XML, do I enter Unicode characters that are not available to me in 
my application or via an operating system service?

When is it useful to use "escapes" to enter characters and when should you 
avoid using escapes?

How do I use NCRs and Character entity escapes?

I would have found it more useful if the content were distributed under 
those three titles; In particular, the question that I find myself most 
interested in answering is how do I enter a very small number of characters 
that are (a) outside the set of characters that I normally use and (b) are 
not easily found on the character picker that comes with Windows. But, I do 
recognize that my usage might be special.

Finally, the first sentence is a little daunting; how about beginning,
"XML (and  (X)HTML) have several "escapes" that allow XML documents to 
represent Unicode characters as a sequence of ASCII characters. These 
escapes include NCRs (Numeric Character References) and character entities."



>============
>Richard Ishida
>W3C
>
>contact info:
>http://www.w3.org/People/Ishida/
>
>W3C Internationalization:
>http://www.w3.org/International/
>
>Publication blog:
>http://people.w3.org/rishida/blog/
>

         Steve
=====================================
Steve Zilles
115 Lansberry Court,
Los Gatos, CA 95032-4710
steve@zilles.org