Why is the accented A character preferred over the equivalent character entity reference?

• From: Costello, Roger L. <costello@mitre.org>
• Date: Wed, 27 Feb 2013 23:03:39 +0000
• To: "www-international@w3.org" <www-international@w3.org>
• Message-ID: <B5FEE00B53CF054AA8439027E8FE17751E70707F@IMCMBX04.MITRE.ORG>

Hi Folks,

In the document "Character Model for the World Wide Web 1.0: Normalization" it says this at the bottom of section 3.3.3:

    With appropriate entity definitions, instead of A´, 
    write Á (or better, use 'Á' directly).

The statement in parenthesis is particularly intriguing. Is it suggesting that Best Practice is to write this:

	<Name>Ándre</Name>

rather than this: 

	<Name>&xC1;ndre</Name>

where &xC1; is the character entity reference for Á.

Why is the former preferred over the latter?

/Roger

Received on Wednesday, 27 February 2013 23:04:07 UTC